Quiet Leaf: Let's be honest , it's not so easy when it comes to find the real good ones

It’s been a while since these photos have been taken (and since I’ve posted something on my blog, you can say it), it was the first time I used my “sports duo” aka the Canon 40D and the 70-200 f/4.

My first experience with my K20D and the Fa* 300mm f/4.5 quickly revealed that I needed a flexible zoom and an autofocus that could hold up against the speed of the game.

I was lucky as I found the body and the zoom shortly after it but as winter came, no more outdoor games that I could shoot (other than skiing of course). So these pictures were the first ones with my Canon-branded-gear and I’m so far extremely pleased with its global performance. Accuracy was on par with my expectations and the USM mechanism never let me down. What’s the next step? Yes, the results! Big part, above all when I came back home, ready to select the good ones. Well, I had very few out of focus images but in the main time I raised the quality I wanted to pull out of this series.

Two major points to consider

The background is SO important.
I didn’t realized it before scrolling through my pictures. The best photo you made can be ruined by some distracting guy behind the players
Shooting with fast lenses helps you to “throw” the distracting background away.
If you’re shooting like me with a f/4 lens on a cropped body, don’t expect a perfect blur and some pictures will be lost because of the background