R7 with RF 70-200 F2.8 for sports

I sold my old faithful EF 70-200 F2.8L IS II a couple of months ago, and replaced it with the RF version. I have now had a couple of opportunities to use the lens with my R7 to shoot runners. I shot the USATF Masters cross-country National Championships, when they were in Boulder in October, and the annual Colder Boulder 5K on the campus of the University of Colorado last weekend. This lens and camera are a perfect match for outdoor action (probably indoor too, but I haven't done that yet). The speed and AF accuracy are amazing. At each event I used a mixture of 8fps in EFCS and 15fps in e-shutter. I keep the camera set to H shooting speed and EFCS, but have a button set up to toggle to silent shooting, which then uses 15fps in e-shutter. I have only ever tried the 30fps setting once in regular shooting, and then again in RAW burst mode, which uses that speed. For me, 30fps is simply overkill. In fact, 15fps is a bit too fast for runners. I would really like to have the option to shoot e-shutter at 8-10 fps. Maybe a firmware update? I'm not holding my breath, because R5 users have been asking for at least one intermediate e-shutter burst speed since the camera came out, but still no luck. At least I have the options of 3fps and 15fps, as well as 30fps and single shot.

I'm still fine-tuning my preferred AF settings, but for runners what I'm mostly going with is a fairly thin vertical zone, starting about halfway up the frame (for either landscape or portrait orientation) to pick out the runner I want to track. I have tracking turned on, and eye detect, but I have a button set to toggle off eye detect. This usually picks up the torso from a great distance, and then the eye when the runner gets a little closer (but still quite a way off). The camera then sticks to the eye until the runner goes out of frame, or I disengage AF.

I'm shooting cRAW (because I've never noticed a difference between that and full RAW in quality of results), and can get about 5600 shots on one 128GB card. I have two identical Sony Tough 128gb V60 cards, set to switch when one is full. At both events I shot over 5400 images (over 6300 at the cross-country), and still had between 60% and 65% battery charge left, so didn't need either of the spares I was carrying. At last weekend's race, I used e-shutter for over 3000 shots, and noticed rolling shutter distortions in exactly 2 of them. I know that rolling shutter can be a problem for certain types of shooting, but it's worth bearing in mind that whether it will be a problem or not is highly context-dependent. If you're shying away from e-shutter, because you've read all the disparaging comments about rolling shutter, but haven't actually tried it, you might want to give it a try, to see whether it is a problem for your shooting. I read a lot of people saying things like "rolling shutter makes the R7 unusable in e-shutter for fast-moving subjects", which is highly misleading. Your subject might be moving very fast indeed, and present no problem at all for e-shutter, depending on the direction and angle of movement. For runners, mostly running towards the camera, rolling shutter simply isn't a problem. At all. What is a problem, as I said, is that you have to shoot at 15fps, which can give you far more images than you need or want. Though it's not a terrible problem (just gives me more images to sort through). I like to use e-shutter for burst shooting, just because it doesn't wear the shutter. When you're shooting 5000 or so images at one race or meet, you can wear out the shutter fairly fast.

As for the buffer, I never hit the limit. Not once. Even when shooting 15fps. I think the longest burst I shot was about 50 shots. I have never felt the need for bursts of longer than around 3 seconds at a time.

Lastly, the RF 70-200 F2.8. What an amazing lens! I loved my older EF version, but this one is even better. It's smaller, lighter, and closer-focusing. If I were a Sony or Nikon shooter, I'd be highly jealous of this lens. Even though the Sony is about the same weight, it's quite a bit bigger. And the Nikon is both bigger and heavier. The optical differences between all the current (and recent) 70-200 F2.8s are trivial. I'm sure no-one will ever notice them in actual images. But everyone will notice the differences in size and weight (also why I'd be jealous of the amazingly small, light, and cheap RF 100-400, if I shot a different system). Here are few samples, first from the women's X-country:

Melody Fairchild, a former national high school champion, and local running celebrity. Finished 3rd overall.

It was a bit unfair of me to position myself at the top of this hill, as they were really hurting at this point!

We have some very fast older runners in Boulder. I'm five years younger than this woman, but couldn't come near to her time on this course.

Almost finished. She finished 4th overall, and 1st in her age category.

One of my training group. About 5 years ago, I could run almost as fast as her. Not anymore.

And some from the men's race:

Top of that hill again. He finished 3rd overall.

One of my coaches. He came within 2 seconds of breaking the world mile record for a 50 year-old a few years ago, and still has the third or fourth fastest time at that distance. But he's hurting like everyone else at the top of that hill.

Pain, pain, and more pain.

75 years old, and still running a brutal 5K course in 29 minutes

The overall winner. Blazing fast.

And a few from last weekend's Colder Boulder:

The overall fastest (the race has a bunch of different waves), sprinting past the lead bicycle

Something tells me this guy is into medieval stuff (and running fast)

Some people can't resist mugging for the camera

Santa chasing one of his reindeer (he had two at the start)

My wife, putting in a good effort at mile 2

Almost at the finish

Rudolph is going to beat Santa

He's giving it all he's got

But Rudolph with her nose so bright whups old Santa's a** all right

Lastly, some from the longest burst sequence I took, of a runner approaching the water station, getting a cup of water, and squeezing it to help drinking:

Focus on the cup

Switched to the runner

Handover

Ready to drink (if there's anything left in the cup)

These are from a sequence of 49 shots in e-shutter

I'm loving the R7. The only improvement that would matter to me, as I said, would be the ability to select 8fps (or so) in e-shutter. And the RF 70-200 F2.8 isn't just a great sports lens. It's also a terrific portrait lens on FF. I used it with my R to take some shots of a grad student in my department who wanted updated pictures for her website, now that she's applying for academic jobs. It pairs beautifully with the R, and gives stunning results.

Thanks for the event wrap up!  Nice shots.

Alastair Norcross wrote:

I used e-shutter for over 3000 shots, and noticed rolling shutter distortions in exactly 2 of them. I know that rolling shutter can be a problem for certain types of shooting, but it's worth bearing in mind that whether it will be a problem or not is highly context-dependent. If you're shying away from e-shutter, because you've read all the disparaging comments about rolling shutter, but haven't actually tried it, you might want to give it a try, to see whether it is a problem for your shooting. I read a lot of people saying things like "rolling shutter makes the R7 unusable in e-shutter for fast-moving subjects", which is highly misleading. Your subject might be moving very fast indeed, and present no problem at all for e-shutter, depending on the direction and angle of movement.

I don't understand, I swear everyone tells me I must shoot small birds as a R7 owner.

I've kept my EF 70-200, which is working nicely for basketball with a Viltrox speed booster.  I don't mind having a bit more light, but the real advantage is the focal length; 50-140 is a lot better than 70-200; unless I really want a wide shot I can stick with one body (my second body is a 7D mkII, which is hopelessly outclassed).

I'm still working on AF settings.  I was thinking a narrow vertical zone but haven't had a chance to set it up; it sounds like your idea is the same as mine.  I'm shooting at 15 fps EFCS; maybe I'll try 8 fps, but basketball moves rather quickly and having more frames means a better chance of getting the shot I want.  Electronic shutter wouldn't be a great idea here, both because of the movement and also because of the lighting (anti-flicker helps in our rather old facility).

I shoot exclusively JPEG.  I don't want to deal with raw conversion and processing, and there seems to be less and less need to.  I'm finding that ISO 8000 is much better than it was on the 7DmkII.  It was quite noisy on that body, but nobody ever cared.    At a pixel level, it's subjectively less noisy than the 7Dii was at 4K, which is impressive.  My workflow's simple: select my shots in KPhotoAlbum (this is Linux), crop and straighten them in RawTherapee, but rather than export them from there, just use the .pp3 files with my own bash/perl script to apply the desired crop and rotation along with an attribution with ImageMagick, which takes advantage of my 12 core (Ryzen 3900X) CPU to process a few hundred frames in under a minute.  I send the uncropped ones to my alma mater's sports information department and post the processed ones.  Here's the center jump from our most recent game against Tufts.  It's definitely not free of noise, but at any reasonable resolution, you have to look fairly closely to spot it.

That looks great. I also always used to use JPEG for sports, until I started using DXO Photolab. Their RAW lens correction modules are so good, extracting so much detail, that I feel I'm missing out if I don't shoot RAW. I did shoot a track meet with my R7 and EF version of the 70-200 in JPEG back in the summer, and was quite pleased with the results. But I kept wondering if they would have looked even better if I'd shot RAW How does the speedbooster affect AF speed? And I would probably also be using EFCS indoors, unless the lighting cooperated. I have found that quite a few indoor lighting setups work just fine with e-shutter, but you have to try it out first to check. You certainly wouldn't want to shoot a whole game, or even a half, only to find that you have ugly stripes across all you images!

Excellent write-up Alastair, and it tracks my own experience with the R7 when shooting sports (esp with the awesome RF 70-200/2.8).  Eye AF and 15 fps eShutter nets close to 100% keepers throughout each burst.  Darn amazing.

Keep up the fine shooting!

R2

Alastair Norcross wrote:

That looks great. I also always used to use JPEG for sports, until I started using DXO Photolab. Their RAW lens correction modules are so good, extracting so much detail, that I feel I'm missing out if I don't shoot RAW. I did shoot a track meet with my R7 and EF version of the 70-200 in JPEG back in the summer, and was quite pleased with the results. But I kept wondering if they would have looked even better if I'd shot RAW How does the speedbooster affect AF speed? And I would probably also be using EFCS indoors, unless the lighting cooperated. I have found that quite a few indoor lighting setups work just fine with e-shutter, but you have to try it out first to check. You certainly wouldn't want to shoot a whole game, or even a half, only to find that you have ugly stripes across all you images!

DXO, unfortunately, doesn't exist on Linux.  And for processing several hundred shots, throughput is important.

AF speed and accuracy seems comparable to what I got shooting football and soccer with my RF 100-500.   I still need to fine tune my settings, since I sometimes lose focus to the background; your idea of a narrow vertical zone sounds right to me.  I also wouldn't want to use ES with a fast moving sport like basketball; I've seen enough shots in similar situations with soccer and volleyball that I expect basketball would be problematic.  Many of the most interesting shots involve players cutting horizontally across the frame or passing or shooting.

I always take some test shots before a game during warmups, even if I haven't changed anything.  If I were going to try ES, I would certainly do plenty of those.