For those of you that have watched some of my sports progress and shots for NBA and other levels of league play, the following outlines my own settings and workflow. It was asked on another forum as well, and I suspect we may have more and more 5D4 shooters as the prices come down, once Canon makes their summer/early fall announcements.
I hope these help some of you, or at least give you a starting point with your new 5D4. (or old 5D4 as you approach school basketball or football) I am not purporting to be some great sports shooter, but I am willing to share those that have definitely allowed me to capture some great moments to help anybody that needs some ideas.
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I have these settings stored on C3, and my workflow and settings are such.
- Switch to C3
- Always shoot a custom WB right out of the gate and set it, if that doesn't work, I set a Kelvin temp.
- AFMA my lenses (for different types of lights), doesn't take long about 1-2 minutes
- Some of these are obvious
* AI Servo
* Shutter speed 1/1600 or faster
* Aperture between f2.8 and f3.5, depending on results through the night
* Auto ISO up to 32000
* EC +1/3
* Spot AF or Single Point AF, again depending on results through the night
* Highlight Tone Priority enabled
* Tracking sensitivity -1
* Accel/Decel +2
* AF point switching -2
* 1st AF priority: focus priority
* 2nd AF priority: equal priority
* Orientation linked AF point turned on
* Full raw, Med fine jpeg
* Picture style: faithful, sharpness strength turned up a bit, threshold turned down a notch, and contrast -1
* High ISO NR set to high
My goals are to use the jpeg only, but when something is wrong, or there are certain images that standout, I go to the raw, tweak and then generate full jpg. I use Canon DPP, it honors all my camera settings right out of the gate, and I only have to tweak those elements I think should be fixed, and then I regenerate the JPG.
I then post process everything in photoshop. I have a bulk cleanup action I run on all files in a folder, then tweak each individual one as needed.
The key is shutter speed IMO. Too many folks are willing to sacrifice shutter speeds for lower ISO. I will ALWAYS want crisp action shots with some noise than blurry action and hardly any noise. I can remove around 1 stop of noise in my images without affecting detail.
