I took my Canon Digital Rebel XT to Evan's soccer practice/game on Saturday, hoping to get some shots of him and his teammates playing the game. I also wanted an excuse to fiddle around with some of the settings and modes on the XT to see how they perform.
Wow.
I turned on rapidfire/burst mode, which can pump out 14 shots in about 3 seconds. Absolutely perfect for capturing the right shot in a game of soccer. I wound up shooting over 150 pictures during the 25 minute game! 99% were deleted, but the 1% that I kept were amazing - and likely impossible to have captured without this mode.
Also, I switched to AF Servo mode - which causes the autofocus system to keep tracking a moving target to maintain focus. So, as Evan and his 'mates were running to and away from me, they were kept in perfect focus at around 5 fps. Absolutely amazing. Check out this shot from a sequence that I shot as Evan ran past me (maybe 10 feet away) with the ball.
Have to say - I'm absofrigging loving this camera... I probably shot 500 pictures this weekend - keeping only about 75 in total. But the ones I kept are pretty cool photos, IMO. I've still got SO much to learn about the XT, and photography in general (especially customizing exposure and aperture settings - many/most of the soccer photos were a little blown out due to the bright morning sun), but I'm looking forward to figuring that out.
Also, a few things I realized after taking this many pictures.
- USB 1.0 connections are painfully slow when dealing with several hundred megabytes of images. I need to pick up a PCMCIA compact flash reader until I have a home computer that has USB 2.0 on board. Ouch, that's slow...
- A 1 GB card may not be enough - I went through a good portion of the card in a 25 minute game. Imagine what a full game/event would take...
- The faster CF cards would be worth it if shooting in rapidfire/burst a lot. I skimped, and just got the el cheapo 1 GB card. If I'd have sprung for the faster one, I could have extended the rapidfire sequences a bit more...