Bruce, I share your point of view. I found a similar situation with photographing swing dances. For a dance shot, f/4 is about as shallow DOF as you want to go. I find 17-70/4 is very suitable for this. (It also gives a little bit of the longer end, - which is occasionally handy, but you loose on the wide end)
Taking photographs at tango events is different. On one hand, some of them do not allow flash, - on another hand, you get more "slow moments" in the dance, when they hit a "line", especially in performances. One is forced (and occasionally can) go to larger apertures, and goes for higher ISOs. Even in those cases, the shallow DOF at 1.4 can be a problem. (IIRC, when I tried my FA50/1.4 I was getting better results closing it to 1.7 - but by no means it was a good, well defined test.) However, I decided that for the majority of cases, fast (and visually confirmed) multi-segment AF (of K-7) is more important to me than the higher ISO. Hence, between K-7 and K-x, I chose K-7 for now. I am tempted to try Nikon D200 or something like that at the next tango event, if I would be able to get my hands on one. Igor Mon Feb 1 20:54:11 CST 2010 Bruce Dayton wrote: I have shot this venue the last two years so I know what I am up against. The only way to shoot it is with a wide to short tele zoom - basically the DA* 16-50 works extremely well. Since I have it and used it last year, that is the lens of choice. For this particular use, AF will probably not be used much. These are team competitions where each member of the team does the same basic thing one after the other. So you would have 10 kids vault one after the other. Literally seconds apart. So you pre-focus on a spot and fire as each one passes through. I do get the run of the floor so I can move around, hence little need for a long lens. But for other basketball shots and evening soccer, continuous AF would be important. Several have mentioned a superfast lens like 1.2 - 1.8 - the issue with that aside from no zoom capability is that I don't want to shoot with so little DOF - f4 is about as fast as I want to shoot. -- Best regards, Bruce -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
