First K3 sports shots

Thought I'd try the K3 for sports

Well they must be rubbish shots coz everybody says Pentax is no good for sports photography.

That's everybody who's never used a Pentax DSLR for sports photography of course.

They look pretty damned good to me.

How good are they? Whoever said that Pentax are not good for sport ought to visit Specsavers.At least then they would see the world through great lenses. Seriously though this camera works!

They certainly look quite good.

How many OOF ones were there, and how many as good as this were there in the entire set?

That would give an indication of how good the AF was.

For instance, if I took 100 photos with the K-5, and enough light to shoot at 1/1000s like these, I'd expect to get about 15 as good as this, so the proportion of in-focus shots would be good to know.

Perhaps a few 100% crops would give an indication of how sharp they actually are. It's not easy to tell, in reality, at this size.

I'm sorry, I don't think they cut the mustard. 1 in particular 1 think is rather poor. Some of the others are just OK. None are of a high standard. Sorry, I hope the K3 can do much better. I have seen much better sports with other equipment that gives much more 'pop'.

Do you mind me asking with what lens these where shot with? The background is very distracting and seems a wide depth of field has been use which has prevented any blurring of the background.

Do you use the 8 fps? I only ask as most of these miss the main part of the action. Take shot one a better shot would have been them just before they got the ball as the approached it.

Shot two has again missed the action point as the ball has passed both players.

Shot three I am guessing is a shot so the image would be better after the ball has been hit and the ball showing some slight blurring due to the speed of it being whacked and also showing some direction.

Shot four again I am guessing is before the ball has been hit.

Shot five shows promise, two players about to fight for the ball, better than shot two.

Shot six looks like the player is going to shoot a static ball.

Please don't take this personally, I just feel these shots show exactly why Pentax is not suitable for fast close contact sport, constantly missing the key point of action which is what I found when I shot football with the k-5 and have not shot football since with Pentax cameras.

Sorry, I'm not convinced either yet. These are reasonable shots of sport. Not in my opinion reasonable sport shots. All the shots I've seen so far from the K3. By all posters could well have been taken by any of the K5's .

The entire gallery is here Ulverston v Keswick

I'm happy with them and more importantly Ulverston Hockey Club were very happy with them. I only caught the last 15 mins of the game.
The AF is definitely an improvement over the K5.
This was only my second day with the K3, I used expanded selective AF (9 points) in hindsight I think I would have been better with the 9 point zone AF as the center point would often pick up the pitch between the players. I used the 60-250mm for all the shots.
Got about 80% hit rate with the AF but I think most of the off ones were user error see above.

100% crop as requested, I tested the lens when I got home and found it needed -5 focus adjustment

I just had a look at your web-site and don't see any sports shots so I'm going to disregard your opinion.

It's very rare you can get "competition winning" sports photos, one comes along every once in a while but not often. Have a look in the newspapers a lot of the sports photos used are very average.

Same again had a look at your web-site and most of your photos are of people stood still on a stage (very good examples) but I don't think you should be commenting on sports photography really

The 100% crop is impressive..... especially when you think
how big the full shot would be.

Looks like a TC won't be needed

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Oh dear. If one had to be an expert in a particular genre of photography to pass comment on examples of it, there would be practically no worthwhile critique ever.

That aside, in the 100% crop, what's the white halo around the dark edges? Was this a JPG out of the camera without post processing, or have you done something to it?

This is especially relevant given that the EXIF appears to show ISO 125 being used, so the amount of noise in the image is quite troubling.

Also, the ball looks as if it's glowing in these shots so it would be worth knowing what's been done to the images.

A bit more information would be helpful before any conclusions can be drawn from these shots.

Great shots of a fast-moving sport, well captured by a non-specialist sports photographer.

/but yes, what processing was used please?

The biggest problem here is that the aperture used isn't large enough to blur the backgrounds enough to stop them being a distraction. Pity f2.8 wasn't an option