Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/09/21
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> To some degree you're right, however me being a Leica SLR motor driven
> sports shooter of twenty five years, I still cling to my R7's with 280mm
> and 400mm 2.8 and soon to be motor driven R8's for my Olympics and other
> national and international sports coverage.
You hit it right on the head. Give Andre Agassi or Tiger Woods
30-year-old-tech equipment and they would most likely whip the pants off any
weekend-clubber with all the latest technology in hand. Just balancing a 400
f 2.8 on a stick is no simple trick, let alone manual focusing. Most likely,
you don't try to follow-focus (as a less-experienced person would likely try
to do) as much as pre-focus...which gets more keepers but requires lots of
prior experience to predict action. My experience shooting sports is purely
recreational, but borrows heavily from 30 years of wildlife work with heavy,
long, manual-focus glass. The original post I was responding to, though, was
from someone who is not seemingly a seasoned sports-shooting pro with Olympic
experience, hence my recommendation to pick an up-to-the-minute AF rig over a
Leica SLR. That individual would probably be extremely frustrated trying to
duplicate what he sees in Sports Illustrated using manual-focus without
benefit of two and a half decades of hands-on experience.
Doc