Yes, exactly. How ever did I manage to get sharp shots with a Nikon FM2 with a manual focus Tamron 300mm F2.8. When things were out of focus, it was my bad technique. I did use a motor drive that noisily gave me 3 frames a second.
I have just read a couple of postings by guys on DPR squabbling about a camera doing 60 frames a second over one that "just" does 30 frames a second. Hilarious.
Al lot of useful progress has been made with photographic equipment, and I would not want to go back to 1988 when I shot these two shots. But I do feel sometimes that we have all become a bit deskilled and lazy with our technique.
Yup a LOT has to do with skill and familiarity with the game, and really understanding the gear.
I shot sports with film before the motor winders and when motor drives were exclusive and expensive. So I shot as fast as my thumb could crank the film advance lever.
I tell the kids, in my day it was not frames per second, it was seconds per frame. So we usually only had ONE shot per event, and we learned timing.
Not 60fps, but 6. A couple years ago, I was shooting tennis, and I had consistently better luck shooting the serve in single shot mode, rather than at 6fps. But for new photogs, that is a skill that has to be learned. And most of them do not have the patience to do that.
Autofocus is a great technology for shooting sports. But . . .
Autofocus is useless when trying to shoot though the volleyball net, to get the player on the other side. The AF will 99% of the time focus on the net. Same with shooting water polo and soccer through the goal net.
Switch to manual focus, and it is easy to focus on the player on the other side of the net.
As you said, AF makes life so much easier, and I would not want to go back to a fully manual lens. However, there have been times when the AF in my lens would "hunt." And as Murphey would have it, those were important plays, like kicking the soccer goal. Those were the times that I was so frustrated with the technology, that I wanted to go to full manual focus. But a 2-ring zoom is not easy to zoom AND focus with. My old 80-200/4.5 with it's single zoom/focus ring was really nice for shooting sports.
One problem is, the dSLR screen is not as easy to manually focus as the old SLR screens.
I used to follow focus the action with my F2. I am not sure that I could do than on my D7200. But now I'm curious to see if I can. Although my follow focus skill is really rusty.
