Another Attempt at Action Photos

Being bound and determined to get decent action photos with the kit lens on the D90 after yesterday's over-exposed blurry messes, I pulled out the 'Mastering the D90' book to see what I could learn.

Well.... Theoretically the '3-D' autofocus mode is what I should be using for action photos.  Well, that's what I HAD been using and I wasn't having wild success.  When I was taking the girls' 'Olympic medals' photo, I used the auto setting, because I couldn't get any of the other settings to focus on two dogs, neither of whom was in the center of the picture, and it worked really well.

So, I thought I'd try the auto setting for the action photos; the worst case scenario is that I'd have yet more pictures of blurry dogs and tack-sharp snow in the background.

But I still had the over-exposure issue.  I had a couple of options; up the shutter speed (which I did, and it seemed to work fairly well), but I also wanted to see if I could find a way to manually adjust the exposure.  The book spoke rather disparagingly of the 'easy exposure compensation' button; the author didn't see the point of Nikon having this on the camera, given all the amazing ways you could handle over/under exposure issues.  Yeah, well, all the amazing ways to adjust the exposure are a bit above my head at the moment, so I was very happy to use the easy button.

Not every picture came out perfectly, but frankly, I got a lot more decent shots today than I did yesterday.

A little bright, that could be adjusted with shutter speed (or the exposure slider in Lightroom).

Action dog in focus!

Action dog in focus and not over-exposed!

Yet another picture where the moving dog is in focus and not over-exposed.  I'm on a roll!

Fi-sters the Fabulous, in action and in focus!

Maybe I'm 'cheating' by using the auto focus setting and the 'easy' exposure compensation button, but until I can figure out other ways to get similar results, I'm happy with the easy settings.  However, I still have no idea why the regular 'auto' focus setting worked better than the 3-D setting (which, theoretically, tracks the moving subject and keeps it in focus as it moves - but hasn't seemed to have worked for me.  It's a tad frustrating, as the similar subject tracking mode in the P520 works amazingly well; I think this is a case of the more complex options of the D90 allowing for clueless people like me to make the wrong set-up choices).

Day 53/365.