3.0 fps help

ok i just bought a sony a-300 with kit lenses and a sandisk extreme III and i was wondering how can i get the best quailty burst shots cuz ill be taking them for poster size of someone skateboarding moving very quickly so i need to know how to set it so i can get very clear pictures but still get 3fps

Shooting in RAW format will give you the highest quality image. Also shooting a high shutter speed will freeze the action. I am not a sports shooter but you might also post this in the sports forum.

Image quality has nothing to do with frame rate.

Learn how to use your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture settings to achieve the best possible combination of image quality and action for the situation.

I'm not a sports shooter and they'll probably be more help in that forum - but something to think about: If, for example, you're shooting at 1/500 to stop action then at 3fps you're only capturing 3/500 of that second. You're not getting 497/500 of it.

Like I said, I've shot sports only a handful of times but I've had better results waiting for the moment than firing off a bunch of shots and picking the best later. Something to try, that's all.

Timing is a better choice than fps. You risk missing the moment you are trying to capture when you simply "spray & pray". I shoot sports professionally and although there are times that contiuous shutter is helpful, there is no substitute for timing.

I agree with the advice given. If you are familiar with the sport, you can anticipate the best moment and time the capture.
But I'd like to ad a couple of points:
You said you will be shooting with a kit lens, so I presume it's slow (around f/4 or so). To achieve a sharp shot with good DOF at 500 or more, you'll have to flood the area with light. I'd ad lights even if you shoot in full sunlight.
I also presume your kit lens is a wide-angle zoom. Along with flooding the area with light, I'd get as close to the action as possible and shoot on the widest focal length to take advantage of the maximum light gathering capabilities and thereby achieve the longest DOF at high shutter speeds. (I'd also shot a few at 1000 if possible.)
What you are proposing to do is actually easier than the sports photography that Daniel does, or the wildlife photography that I do, because you can control almost everything involved: lighting, distance and model performance. Don't leave anything to chance, which is what you would be doing at 3fps.

Oh, and another thing:
You said you want to make poster prints. How much you can enlarge a shot is dependent upon the sharpness of the original and the number of megapixels your camera produces. I'm not sure about this, but I would think you would need at least 10 MP for a poster.

so raw is the best setting? thank you ill be sure to try that out and give some feed back

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Originally Posted by Ron Kruger

Oh, and another thing:
You said you want to make poster prints. How much you can enlarge a shot is dependent upon the sharpness of the original and the number of megapixels your camera produces. I'm not sure about this, but I would think you would need at least 10 MP for a poster.

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Nawwww. It's how you set them up that's important. More resolution is always nice. But I've made huge prints from 4-megapixel cameras (5 feet big enough for you?). If you have a good exposure and you interpolate (digitally increase the resolution) you should be able to double the native resolution of your image files without really compromising image quality.

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Originally Posted by dhyravy

when you simply "spray & pray".

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This is classic and I just love it! I may have to borrow it if you don't mind.

Just to back it all up. I agree. My very first camera yielded one shot and then time to recover. I got my timing down so well with that thing. Now I shoot at 10 fps, and I have to say getting my timing down with one shot was probably the best lesson I've ever learned in sports photography.

I'm going to be cracking up over "spray & pray" all night!

"spray and pray"

I like that :)

I see guys holding down the shutter release on the EOS-1D Mark IIIs at mountain bike races and I always feel a little like it's cheating. If you blast off thirty frames and then just pick one, did you really do anything special? Of course, getting the shot is key. And you do what you have to do. But learning some timing is honorable. The buy the fast camera and hold down the button :D

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Originally Posted by Photo-John

If you blast off thirty frames and then just pick one, did you really do anything special?

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Well, what about using AF to shoot bird in flight or, in your example, bike racing, to get a sharp shot? They used to be the kind of shots difficult to do, but now many if not anybody could do it. Would you think it's more special to shoot it with MF instead? :D

Loupey? :)

No problem JETA, I borrowed it from someone else.

Another issue with continuous shutter use is that with fast moving objects (and the camera/lens you have) the AF doesn't have time to catch up so you wind up with only a few of them in focus.

While I totally agree that learning to time a shot for the decisive moment is a vital skill to learn, I think that the discussions here are primarily sports-oriented (reasonable based on the question asked by the OP). But I do think that many types of shots that we see in the N&W forum are more unpredictable (much like trying to shoot the multiple exchanges of a fumbled football) and so a higher frame rate can be much more of a factor.

Trying to time a shot of a hummingbird’s wing while it beats at 40~60 times per second or capturing dueling butterflies in flight or getting an unobstructed shot of a warbler flitting around a branch plucking bugs requires more than simply a “well timed shot” to be successful consistently. A high frame, albeit in short controlled bursts, increases the odds exponentially under these circumstances.

Still, I’ve been able to get high action, unpredictable N&W shots with a rather slow 10D (3 fps). But it is much more difficult.

so basically trial and error wil fix this?

and just in general . how do i get my camera to shoot at 3fps everytime??? thats sounds dumb but somettimes it shoots like 2fps if that

Probably low shutter speed. You can't get 3 fps if the shutter speed is less than 1/320.

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Originally Posted by Photo-John

Nawwww. It's how you set them up that's important. More resolution is always nice. But I've made huge prints from 4-megapixel cameras (5 feet big enough for you?). If you have a good exposure and you interpolate (digitally increase the resolution) you should be able to double the native resolution of your image files without really compromising image quality.

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As I said, John, I'm not sure about this, so I find your post interesting and would like you to elaborate. How high did you set the resolution to get a good 5-foot print from a 4 MP exposure?

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Originally Posted by Ron Kruger

As I said, John, I'm not sure about this, so I find your post interesting and would like you to elaborate. How high did you set the resolution to get a good 5-foot print from a 4 MP exposure?

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I love it when people that think you can't do something argue with people that have done it consistently.

There is no such thing as "setting up" resolution. And there are no guidelines whatsoever as to minimum resolutions for certain sizes. The steps required to blow up any image to any size are as simple as load it up, tone and sharpen it a bit, blow it up and sharpen a bit more.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the pixels, the viewing distance and the personal threshold for quality that dictates if a person is happy with a print. Pulling out arbitrary numbers has no place in any of this.

I wasn't arguing, but trying to learn by asking questions of someone I thought had knowledge I lacked.
I sell my images to magazines, and most of them require (set guidelines) that images be at least 300 dpi, and I've found that if I set the dpi at 400 in PhotoShop, the resolution is good enough for 8X10 cover reproduction. But I don't have any experience with larger prints--so I ask questions.
To think that I was arguing was reading me wrong.

Posters do to the viewing distance you can get good prints at 72 DPI (a good fractal enlarging logarithm program does help). But the Image must be in focus, and have good contrast to even begin. It's the "old garbage in garbage out".