New 70-200 f4L Wakeboard Shots

Ok, I must admit that I was one who shot rulers and such when I got my 70-200 f4L, and was obsessed with the backfocusing, but the more I use it, the happier I am with this lens. I'm convinced that it does backfocus a little at 70mm, but I don't think its a major issue.

I shot a friend wakeboarding yesterday morning with this lens on my 300D and am pretty happy with the results. Take a look and offer your comments on both the lens and my technique:

http://home.insightbb.​com …hs/wakeboarding​/index.htm


thanks,
daniel

Great shots, Daniel. I love how you can so clearly see each water droplet in the spray around him...

great shots,
nice focusing, what were the settings in general?

regards

Khalid

In general:

Shutter ranging from 1/1600 on many shots to 1/4000 with the majority being 1/2000.

f4 on all shots

ISO 200

FL ranging 100-200mm, most shots at 200mm

Center Weighted Ave. Metering


-daniel

Great shots !
I'm very interested by this lens. So, thanks for posting these shots.
As I'd like to see the real performance of this lens, may I ask you to post a link for one of these shots in full size ? Thanks

Yacine.

Which shot do you want in full size and can I just email it to you? Do you want a JPG?

Forgot to mention, these were all shot in RAW and then converted in PSCS to JPG for the web.

-daniel

Thank you Daniel.
I'm of course more interested by a raw file.
The shot n° 14 would be perfect.
You can click on the button button below to send me the link by e-mail (please don't send the whole raw file by e-mail as it's too big).

Thanks a lot.

Yacine.

Nice shots and good action. Your camera got fooled by the backlighting in those that didn't have trees behind him, but that's probably because you were bouncing around and couldn't keep the focus point on him all the time and it sometimes metered on the back sky.

I would have sacraficed some of the shutter speed for a smaller fstop though. That would have given you a bit more depth of field, which is always helpful when you have fast movement like this.

Mike

You think the smaller f-stop would have been good? On wakeboarding shots like these we typically shoot with the largest to get the subject to really "pop" out of the shot with the blurred background.

I'll work on the link to the full size photo. I may have deleted all of the RAW's.

Ok, sorry it took me so long....but here is your full size No.14 image.

http://home.insightbb.​com …ographs/fullsiz​efiles.swf

Click on this URL and then once you're there:

Rt. click on the button and save target as to get the image on your hard drive, or just click on the link to see the full-size image. Keep in mind it is a compressed jpg, so some minor quality will be lost.

-daniel

Sorry, I forgot I did that link in Flash, so you can't "save target as." But just go under Tools and Internet Options in your Browser and make sure that automatic image resizing is disabled, and then you'll get the full size image by clicking on the button.

-daniel

Daniel, you can always soften the background in Photoshop if you really need it, but with the digital cameras, you don't get a out of focus background like you do with film cameras anyway. And in my opinion, the added depth of field is going to do you a lot more good on shots like this than a partially out of focus background. That wakeboarder is bouncing in and out of focus as you compose the shot, so the wider your DOF is, the better.

Try some with a wider DOF next time and see if it works for you. You might like it or you might not. But that's the fun of trying things out.

Mike

Thank you Daniel for the full size jpeg.

Even if the quality is great, but to say the truth, in regard to what I have read about this lens, I was expecting a little more sharpness.
May be it's because the action was very fast or may be it is the ISO 200 (even if I don't think it is for that reason...)

Yacine.

Mike,

Do you really think that you can't get the blurred background with digital SLR's? I'd like to hear more about this. This effect is a result of the aperture, which has more to do with the lens than the camera body. And this lens, of course, is used on both digital and film SLR bodies. I'm curious as to the reasons why you say you can't get the blurred background with wide-open digital SLR's? I will try a longer DOF next time and see what I think....You're right, the fun is playing!

But the rider bouncing in & out of the DOF really is more limited than you might think. Remember that he is on a fixed-length line. So, he's not moving toward or away from the boat more than a few inches between the time I compose the shot and press the button. And at 65ft away, those few inches may or may not make a big difference.

You're right, you can pretty easily blur the background in PS, but I'm one of those who likes to get the best shot possible before any post-processing. PS is alot of fun, but for real-photographs that I want to get printed, I really try to not do any processing outside of the RAW format processing to JPG or TIFF. I know with many images, it doesn't matter, but I just think that anytime you're mangling pixels in PS, you're losing original quality. And then when you save that JPG you're working on, of course you lose more quality as the file is compressed.

I'll play with the DOF though next time and post the results for ya!

YACINE,

You're welcome. Sorry the quality is not what you expected. I was very critical of this lens at first too, and I didn't think it was quite as sharp as it should be. Maybe it isn't. But after comparing a friend's wakeboarding shots with his descent-quality Point & Shoot....the shots from this lens are easily 10X the quality. They were not even comparable. You have to remember that I was in a boat going 20 mph, bouncing around, and shooting a moving action-target. I was fairly impressed with the results.

Does anyone else feel that the images are not as sharp as they should be with this lens?

-daniel

form taht aperture and shutter speed, hard to get sharper images. I thing it's jsut a great lens/ camera combo
if you did try f/8 and >, you'd loose some DOF but also got much less softness, you couldn't get better for the setting

regards

Khalid