help with lens choices

jubbin2001 · Nov 3, 2011

Hey all,
I hope I can get some good sound advice on some lens choices for my D80. My daughter decided she wanted to play volleyball this year, and of course I want to shoot her games. Right now the only lens I have that would kind of work is my 28-300mm Tamron lens. I think we can all agree this lens would be less than ideal for this situation. I was hoping that some of you that have kids in sports and have shot such events could chime in and help me out. I have around $1500 to invest, so hopefully I can do something with that.

I often am very disappoited when viewing my 300mm images at 100% with the Tamron, and now have somewhat of a bad taste in my mouth from the experience. I am not too sure about using them again. I would rather have less length and sharp images than soft images close up, and the Tamron is just too soft for what I want.

Any help, and links to examples would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all!

KmH · Nov 4, 2011

I think how much light you have to work with indoors will be the main issue.

Even with more recent cameras that have better high ISO performance than your D80, f/2.8 constant aperture zoom lenses have difficulty collecting enough light to keep the shutter speed high enough (1/500) to eliminate player motion blur.

How close to the court will you be? How much light, measured with a incident light meter, does the venue provide? Do you have a good speedlight?

This lens (or 3rd party brands) is typically used for shooting vollyball from courtside -

Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor Wide Angle Zoom Lens

3rd party - Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 IF EX DG HSM AF Standard Zoom Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

table1349 · Nov 4, 2011

50mm f1.4, 85mm f1.8, 35mm f 1.8. Primes will serve you much better indoors for volleyball, basketball etc. It's virtually all I shooting indoor sports.

Derrel · Nov 4, 2011

You need a lens that focuses FAST, and surely, and costs less than $1,500, and you have a Nikon D80 body.

So, you need to focus on the fast-focusing lenses. Those would be the 50mm 1.4 AF-D, the 50mm 1.8 AF-D, and the 35mm f/2 AF-D, and the 85mm 1.8 AF-D. Forget the 50 1.4-G lens: even though it is AF-S, it focuses as slow as a glacier...notably,notably a slow-focuser. The 35/2 is a faster focuser than the newer AF-S G model. The 85mm 1.8 focuses very fast.

I'm not sure what kind of crack the Nikon engineeers were smoking when they decided to make new AF-S, (Gelded) series lenses that focus slower than older screw-driven lenses...

and then, they designed the 50 1.8 AF-S G, priced cheaper than the 1.4 AF-S, and which focuses faster than the 1.4 model...

Skip over the 24-70mm f/2.8 lenses from Nikon or Sigma.

jubbin2001 · Nov 5, 2011

Wow good information. Thanks all. Right now for lenses I have the 18-55 kit,which I am not sure is much of a contender, since it's on the slow side (3.5-5.6), a Nikon 50mm AF 1.8D, And I just picked up a Nikon 70-300mm VR near mint for cheap ($300) :mrgreen:. For a speedlight, all I have right now is a Nissen Di622 (which is terribly noisy, I would like a quieter replacement), and the built-in. I am going to try and be on the sidelines as much as I can, but I can't say that I will be there all the time. I am hoping the 70-300mm will allow me to take some acceptable pics if I get pushed back up into the bleachers.

So with that information, how am I looking so far? I am thinking since the SB-700 came out, I might try and find an SB-600 a little cheaper to replace the Nissen. I just hate how it sounds when you adjust the head. I am not sure on that though. I am in a tug of war right now between that and the SB-700. There are some features of the 700 I like, but the price on the 600 is hard to beat (I can get one right now around $200). Decisions decisions. Thanks again!!