Shooting a Ping Pong Tournament, Part 2

I tried some different techniques on Sunday when I returned to the Vaughn Athletic Center in Aurora, IL, for the second day of the Butterfly Ping Pong tournament.

I used my Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM on my Canon 7D and my (new-to-me) Canon FD 100mm f/2.8 on my Sony a6000 (converted to a 72mm f/2.0 by the Metabones Spped Booster adapter).  

Yesterday, the AF couldn't tracking these targets, so I mostly did manual focus.  Since the targets are not really changing their distance to the camera, I figured that setting the focus would be better than the crappy AF I was seeing yesterday.  I was right.  I still had many out-of-focus pix, but I'd say I had 3 times more usably sharp images than yesterday.

I took 1100 pix with the a6000 (*all* manual focus using the 100mm lens) and 400 with the 7D (about half manual focus using both the 50mm and the 70-200mm).  

The a6000 really was able to do 10fps; the 7D was still slow, but not asking it to do AF sped it up a lot.  (Maybe 6fps, but in spurts).

I shot JPEG, exclusively.

I have purged all these images down to about 50 shots.  

One teaser shot (a6000, 100mm (72mm), ISO 6400, 1/800, f/2.8 (f/2.0)):

I ordered a 16GB SDHC card capable of 150MB/sec (3.75 times faster than the card I have now).

You can see all my shots from Sunday at http://itstheoptics.com/?/category/26