On 2010-04-13 20:25, Graydon wrote:
I find the FA100 is an excellent general purpose things-out-of-reach lens; inside at the zoo, flowers, stuff across the room, etc.
Geez, I feel so out of place around here sometimes. There don't seem to be nearly as many "long glass" shooters on the PDML as there used to be (I know /you're/ there, John Francis :-) ).
I rarely use anything shorter than 200mm. I have the 16-45 and 50-200 DA lenses, but it's relatively rare that my usual "topics" admit the use of such short lenses for reasonable compositions.
Last weekend, Road Atlanta and the USERA (http://www. had a big event to celebrate 25 years of the Spec Racer Ford(now)|Renault(then) class, 40 years of Road Atlanta, and some other anniversary that I don't remember. It was great racing and awesome weather.
On Saturday I exposed 1,973 frames and on Sunday 500 more. Far more than I expected, or really realized at the time I was doing it. Though I /did/ notice the "SD card wallet" getting kinda thick. Of those nearly 2,500 frames, I got about 1,200 that passed the first cull, which I think is pretty darned good, considering it's been so long.
I was mostly practicing for Walter Mitty, which is the last weekend of April at Road Atlanta. Technically, it's the Historic Sportscar Racing Mitty Speedfest this year, but that's marketing BS. :-) I haven't gotten much shooting done at the track for the last year or so, so I needed the practice.
Of the 2,500 exposures, 2,100 or so were with the FA* 200/2.8, F* 300/4.5, or the Sigma APO 400/5.6 Macro. The rest were on the DA 50-200. I don't think I dropped the shutter once on the 16-45. I'd have used the hell out of an FA* 600/4, if it made economic sense for me to spend that kind of geld on a hobby (other than women or racing :-) ).
I'll toss a few of my personal favorites from the event out there in the next day or two. I got lucky a couple of times.
There were several cases where I could've used a faster machine gun than the K-10D. I don't generally "machine gun" exposures, but when something goes wrong on track, you don't have time to think and compose. You have to grab every frame you can as the action evolves. Or I do, at least. When the entire fracas is over in two to three seconds, or a lot less, and still can cover a couple of hundred meters, well, my brain has never worked /that/ fast.
The frame rate isn't nearly as limiting as the buffer size. I need at least three to five seconds of buffer at the highest frame rate the camera can achieve at max resolution, no dark frame subtraction, no lens distortion correction, nothing, DNG or raw, to handle those situations without luck playing the dominant role.
But, basically, it sometimes seems like I'm on the other end of the boat from most of the PDML faithful a lot of the time, any more. Not whining, just noticing, maybe myopically. And realizing full well that I shoot in a niche of subjects for the most part. There just used to be more fellow niche dwellers a few years ago. :-)
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