nnowak
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Veteran Member
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Posts: 9,074
Re: Action shots - Faster lens options (EF preferred) and camera software settings
EscVelocity wrote:
Fair points, but the ambiguity was intentional, since the answers vary.
Ambiguity will lead to a lot of bad answers. You are just going to get a list of every relatively decent lens that is liked by that particular individual, whether it fits your needs or not.
For school events, sometimes it's sports day, sometimes it's elementary kids zipping about and participating in a cool project or activity, and if something also is a good fit to take pictures at a school play or concert that's a nice bonus.
If you are in a classroom close to the kids, the EF-M 11-22mm or EF-S 10-18mm would be a good option. Either of these lenses could potentially also work for a play or concert depending on your seating position and if you are trying to capture the entire show and not just single kids.
Recommending a lens for sports is going to require a lot more information. Are you indoors or outdoors? Are you trying to capture an action shot of a single child, or more overall photos of the entire game (sort of like how a game is covered on television). For outdoor field sports, such as soccer, your 55-250mm would be the minimum, but something like the EF 100-400mm L would likely be better. The 85mm f/1.8 that some are suggesting would be pretty lousy in this setting.
Indoor sports will depend a lot on which sport, where you are positioned relative to the action, and what type of image you are trying to capture. If you are up in the stands trying to follow a single kid on a basketball court, a 70-200mm f/2.8 will be one of the better options. If you are much closer to the action, and/or are OK with looser framing, a wider, brighter prime can work well. The problem here, is that EF primes wider than 50mm and at least f/1.8 are relatively big, heavy, and expensive. Any bright prime wider than 50mm will be best served with a native EF-M mount lens like the Canon 32mm or Sigma 30mm.
Pets probably aren't a huge issue here, and animals are whatever I happen to see when hiking. I probably should have better emphasized that budget is a key consideration, but I really wanted a wide range of thoughts so I could do some research from there.
If your budget is tight, then it is even more important to clearly define your needs to ensure you are not wasting money of something you don't need. It is quite possible you already own the "right" lens.
I would love to hear you expand on why a speed booster is a bad idea, as I've mostly read good things about the Viltrox, but I don't know much about speed boosters.
I was converting Sony mount Metabones Speedboosters to Canon EF-M mount years before Metabones launched their version. My comments below are from personal experience with the Matabones Speedbosoters, which are optically superior to the Viltrox version.
Metabones launched the first speedbooster years ago, primarily for video use, before full frame mirrorless cameras existed and before most crop systems had a relatively full lens set. Full frame DSLRs that were video capable were at least 3X the cost of current full frame mirrorless cameras. If you were an early adopter of video with mirrorless cameras, a speedbooster was your only option for wide or bright lenses on a crop camera.
The big problem, though, is the lenses you would most want to speedboost also tend to have the worst results on a speedbooster. Wide and/or bright lenses tend to have the most issues on a speedbooster. The telephoto lenses that will work well on a speedbooster are the last lenses you would want to be wider. The EF 200mm f/2.8 will work well on a speed booster, but you end up with a 142mm f/2.0 that is bigger, heavier, and performs worse than the 135mm f/2.0 L. The 17-40mm f/4.0 L would give you a 12-28mm f/2.8, but it is an optical mess on a speedbooster. The 50mm f/1.8 is roughly the threshold for speedboosting. Even the EF 50mm f/1.4 looks pretty lousy on a speedbooster. A speedboosted lens on a crop camera will always produce worse image quality than the bare lens on a full frame camera.
For video use, some of the issues with speedboosters are not issues. The 16:9 apsect ratio for video crops off a lot of the mess that can happen in the corners of the frame. Lens sharpness is also less critical when you are capturing 2MP 1080P video versus 24MP still images. The other factor is that modern mirrorless specific lenses are almost always significantly better optically than any older DSLR specific designs. A lot of those older DSLR lenses had soft corners and aberrations that get magnified by the speedbooster.
The size, weight, and cost of a speedbooster is not insignificant, and there are a lot of downsides to their use. With the current state of mirrorless systems, if you think you need to use a speedbooster, you are probably using the wrong system. Used full frame cameras are plentiful and cheap, and most mirrorless lens sets have almost anything you would need. At this point, I would call speedboosters a "curiosity" for experimental use only.
I'm definitely going to have to read up and learn more about the merits of different AF modes.
More important than any specific AF settings is you, the photographer. Action photography takes a lot of practice, and there is no magic AF setting that will shortcut that need for practice. One of the hardest parts of action photography is keeping your subject framed in the viewfinder. Tracking AF is worthless if your panning is subpar and your subject is no longer in the viewfinder. Intimate knowledge of the sport will help you anticipate when and where action will take place. Visualize your desired images and put yourself in the right position with right lens to capture those images.
