I have a background in photojournalism that goes back to when I was a young man, some 25 years ago...and I've worked as a local area sports photographer for hundreds of sports assignments from NCAA to high school to youth sports...my best friend is the official photograher for a minor league baseball team and has been so for about seven years now, and he has shot the original Digital Rebel, and now shoots with the 12 megapixel Rebel model and my 80-400 Sigma OS,which is on sort of permanent loan to him...
Anyway...he can shoot circles around the local newspaper's "pro" photographer who shoots baseball with a Canon 1D-something and a 400/2.8 and a remote-mounted camera he sets up aimed at home plate and which he trips with a PW from his shooting position when something happens over at home plate...with a Rebel, Steve can swing and fire on a play, beginning with the camera not even at his eye, and not even on a monopod, and can nail play after play, game after game...with a Rebel !!!! Steve KNOWS baseball, inside and out, backwards and forwards....he's a former catcher, the closest thing to a Quarterback that there is in baseball...anyway....
For several seasons, he used the original Rebel,then the newer Rebel with his 75-300 Canon IS lens and did quite well,within the limitations of the lens. Then I saw a great deal on the Sigma 80-400 used, and bought it,and took it over to Steve's house, so he could give it a shakeout...and he IMMEDIATELY got better quality pictures. The old Canon 75-300 is a purple fringing monster,and was softish at the longer end--the Sigma is a much better lens, and his pictures IMMEDIATELY, from Game 1, looked better. The biggest problem was the Rebel's autofocus capabilities in lower-light,later-innings situations.
Last season, he and I shot a playoff game, side by side. I shot my Nikon from a monopod using my 200 f/2 and alternating between 1.5x and 2.0x High Speed Crop for 200mm and 400mm fields of view....he shot the Rebel and the 80-400 until the fourth inning, then switched to my 70-200 2.8 L-IS, which I had brought along, knowing that we'd lose the light late mid-way through the game..and this being a minor-league ballpark, the lights AIN'T what you see in MLB...far from it.
Well, around the end of the sixth inning, the D2x's High-ISO limits crept in and even with an f/2 lens, it was dicey...my speeds were too slow....the images look like crap after the sun has gone down...I said, "I'm done for the night," since I didn't really need to shoot any more. He perservered with the Rebel and 70-200 2.8...he was used to working with f/5.6 as his max aperture as the sun got lower...but with the 2.8 lens, he was able to max out the Rebel's High-ISO setting and shoot and get some serviceable images, mainly due to the camera's high ISO capabilities. The D2x tops out at about ISO 800, and above that the images are absolutely horrific under artificial lighting like we had the last few innings of the game.
The moral of this story?? A high-speed camera like the D2x at 8.2 FPS in DX capture mode and a big,fancy f/2 lens isn't really as useful in low light as a camera that has a usable ISO 1600, and which can be "pushed" to ISO 3200 with an f/2.8 lens...and a guy who really KNOWS how to shoot can do pretty amazing work with camera with a weak AF module. I know of a number of professional PJ's here in town whose working kit for all but sports assignments is TWO Canon 5D-II's...and they use them to shoot all types of stuff, but the critical factor is that the 5D-II shoots fantastic video for the paper's web site. The paper bought 20 5D-II's...everybody gets two....and they also have a segment of guys who shoot Nikon,and have for 20,30 years...and those guys use the D3s or 700 and D300s for the most part. WHat they like about the pro Nikons? THe ability to do voice annotation for their selects, right in the field...they can caption the shots with a simple voice clip,and the files transmit with the selects. The D3s also has PHENOMENAL High-ISO capabilities and killer autofocusing capabilities, and has a big following for use on high school night football and soccer, where the lighting is simply,in a word, atrocious. The D3s is king at nighttime, no-light work.
The point is, photojournalists and sports shooters work with what they have...sometimes their equipment is not the best, or it's even out of date. There's a lot to be said for any of the newer,modern digital SLR's as PJ cameras. I honestly think some of the younger members here have no idea how good things really are, and they also have an inadequate understanding of the full frame cameras and their advantages for PJ work...crop-body cameras make a lot of lenses nearly useless. Once the file hits newsprint, even 6 megapixels is equal to 24MP-- on newsprint, or the web.
An aside: one of my 'idols' was shooting a high school playoff game back in 2006, and I asked him for some advice. He gave me some. He was shooting a Nikon D2h. At halftime, we talked about what we'd gotten. He said he had four good shots. He reviewed what he had, and said he was gonna transmit, then head home for the night.
He pulled the card out of the camera....it was a 512 megabyte card!!! I commented on the card size and he said, "Heck, I grew up on film...this 512 feels like a million shots to me." Night football, 512 MB card, pro sports shooter with 30+ years' experience...
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