Thanks Brett, I see you did a little bit on the RT in that thread. It looks to me like the RT is no good focus wise if the subject is moving?
Hi Mike,
I am probably not the best person to comment on that, because focus tracking is something I don't tend to use very often at all. I have tried it once or twice with a moving car with my 630/600 (the RT is essentially a modified 630; same shutter, same flash interface, motor drive, 630 custom functions plus a few more, etc.). With cars on a closed circuit (Baskerville, near Hobart) it didn't fare too well at all, as they were approaching directly towards me on the main straight doing about 130-180 km/h. But on the street I got some shots of a car travelling at 60 km/h which were in focus (towards, and past me, shot from the other side of a suburban side street).
Whilst my familiarity with the focus tracking function is quite limited, on the basis of it, I would have thought that, for example, tracking a person walking towards you wouldn't be a very big ask at all (assuming, of course, they are more than just a few feet away, from, say, six feet or so there's not a lot of time or depth of field available). And it will naturally depend on the light levels involved too, as well as the lens, as some EOS lenses are themselves faster than others in my experience.
I don't do an awful lot of photography involving moving subjects, but when I do, I will often pre-focus and shoot when the subject is at the focus point. But I use manual focus cameras 95% of the time, anyway, and if you're to have a hope of getting these kinds of shots with Eg. a Rolleiflex you have no other option. If you do this with an RT in "RT" mode, the biggest challenge, in my experience, is not hitting the button too early, as, if one anticipates the fraction of a second delay most SLRs experience due to mirror retracting etc. you'll shoot too soon, in practice an 8 millisecond lag doesn't exist for most peoples' reflex ability and you can effectively shoot at the instant you want the shot, not just prior. On the other hand this is wonderful for tasks such as portraiture involving flash imaging. Set the body to "RT" and the flash to second curtain sync, and even the worst serial blinkers can't beat it, by the time they've reacted, the exposure has ended. I love it for that and of course you get visual confirmation the flash has actually fired which is nice.
I am just across the pond in Tasmania Mike, so if you will find yourself near Hobart in the near future, there's an open invitation to run a roll through my own RT, to help you decide for yourself.
Cheers,
Brett
