Shooting sports with a rangefinder

[Michael Markey]

Looking through them I kept on thinking how much better they would be if he had used better equipment.
This just proved that he could shoot the Olympics with his phone. But not do the best job by doing that.

Well precisely , it all comes down to what sort of picture you find acceptable I guess .
I look back on the ten years I shot action with RF`s and regret I didn`t use a more appropriate camera.
That`s not to say that I didn`t get the occasional pleasing result in the circumstances given the limitations of the camera but I`d of been better changing the circumstances.
For me the challenge wasn`t the point ….. I just found it frustrating.

 

[embee06311]

Early on (after I got my sideline pass) I experimented with rangefinder cameras. Now I use mostly SLRs.

This is with a Leica M3 and the Summilux 50mm f/1.4...
2018-02-01-04013 by Michael Burkholder, on Flickr


Here I tried to be Winogrand-esk with a 28mm lens...
2017-10-19-2719 by Michael Burkholder, on Flickr

 

[DanskDynamit]

Looking through them I kept on thinking how much better they would be if he had used better equipment.
This just proved that he could shoot the Olympics with his phone. But not do the best job by doing that.

I think he did proved that you can shoot the Olympics with a smartphone, and in a very decent way, which is the reason why he used a smartphone in first place.

 

[Jeremy Z]

It really depends a lot on the sport.

For a spot like soccer (football) in which you can't predict where the action will occur, it is always going to be difficult. I bet the sports pros from the manual focus era had it down to an art: knowing which way to turn for closer vs. further and how fast to turn it...

For a sport with more predictability, as to location, you can preset and wait til the subject enters your pre-focused zone.

 

[Archiver]

When shooting with the GH4 and Voigtlander m43 primes, I found it fairly easy to use liveview and 'roll' the focus with the action. Not so with a rangefinder, which was quite annoying. Random movement is hard to predict and much harder to shoot unless you're going hyperfocal.

 

[willie_901]

pictures, please. thank you.

Almost all my sports photos were for pay. I am contractually unable to show any photos.

I made a few sports photos in the 1968-71 with a Mamiya-Sekor 500Tl 35mm SLR film camera (no AF). I used a 135 M42 mount lens. When I posted these on FLICKR some were stolen and used without my permission. I took them down.

I have some from a Zeiss Ikon M (Zeiss Ikon 50mm/1.5 C Sonnar and Biogon 35//2) I have a few from Fujifilm X-Series cameras. These are of family members which I prefer not to post on line.

 

[Godfrey]

In the distant past, I shot football with a 4x5 Speed Graphic and with a host of 35mm RF compacts when I was in high school. Few examples of such stuff exist outside of my High School Yearbook, which is somewhere around the condo.. 🙂

In the middle and late 1990s, I carried an M4-P and later an M6TTL along with me on several trips to the UK and the Isle of Man, shot air shows and motorcycle road racing with them... This one was with a Tele-Elmarit-M 90mm lens on the M6TTL (and TA's Rapidwinder baseplate as well):

Keith At Sulby Bridge on Flickr​

It was a little frustrating because 90mm on 35mm format is a little short for that kind of shooting, and 35mm format film doesn't have enough area for the cropping I could do with 4x5 inch format film. Even a 135 or 200mm lens would have done me a bit better, and even in the close quarters capable with road racing on the IOM.

My more recent IOM shooting was with the digital Leica CL and a 50 or 90 mm lens. The 90mm gives a 135mm FF equivalent-FoV that proves very nice for the tighter parts of the circuit, a longer lens (135 or 180 mm) nets more reach for some of the faster, longer-view sections.

G