How well does the A99 work for sports photography

William Porter wrote:

Sean,

I can see about four different ways to deal with this problem.

1. Focus and recompose. Not a good option if (a) you're close to the focal plane and/or (b) you're using a very wide aperture for very shallow depth of field. Or (c) you just don't like focus and recompose.
2. If you had the focus points where you needed 'em, you could set the autofocus option to "local" (selective point), then fiddle with the joystick or controller to get a point on the right or left side selected as the main, active focusing point. I used to do this but almost exclusively with portraits where I had the time to fiddle with the focus. I never liked it much.
3. The alternative — and the approach I now prefer, since getting the A77 — is to use focus magnification, move the joystick to select the magnified area, and focus manually. This isn't any quicker than #2 but it works anywhere in the scene regardless of whether there's a focal point there are not. And it's 100% accurate.
4. Manual focus with peaking. Unlike #3, this approach is not 100% accurate, but it's quicker.

The choice that's pertinent to this thread is the one between #2 (selecting the focus point) and #3 (using focus magnification). Personally I think the advantage falls to #3 and by a wide margin. I wouldn't be terribly unhappy to give up the selective-focus (local) point option entirely, provided I could retain zone and center ("spot"), and provided I could also keep focus magnification.

Will