Basketball

Leuven 19-April 021, originally uploaded by gugs.

Just an example to show that the D3 is a wonderful tool for sports, here used with the 70-200VR lens. Two important remarks: the auto white balance works extremely well, no real need to correct in post-production, unlike with other older generation cameras (D70, D200 etc). The other remark is about the AF system, very complex to understand to get the proper results. After experimenting, I found the winning combination for indoor sports: I used continuous mode, with the delay set to long so that if I "lock" a target I don't lose it too quickly - as a consequence, I have to press the AF-ON button more often to re-focus if I choose another point of attention - not too easy when players are moving that fast , and fire with the shutter button. I switched VR off, I selected a shutter speed of at least 1/400sec with the 70-200VR... and the results were more than acceptable...
My other recommendation is to avoid the full 3D mode for indoor sports (this has been my experience with both Tennis and Basketball, unless you are very close or use a very long lens). I used the dynamic mode with 21 or 9 points AF, this gave me more predictable results (at least for basketball), I would assume this depends on the size of the "objects" you track...