I had the opportunity to shoot pictures of my grandson (with the ball) playing football this past Saturday with my Nikon D-300. I used the kit lens that came with it. It's a AF-S DX VR Zoom 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED lens. I use it for most of the action work I do with this camera. I ended up with 1023 totally sharp frames by the time the game ended.The game was being played in the late morning when the sunlight was very harsh. There were no clouds in the sky to soften it up so the shadows are very deep due the the high contrast. My camera settings were: exposure mode - P, ISO 200, White Balance - Sunny, Quality - medium/basic, continuous focus mode with the release mode set to high. I used "Dynamic Area Auto Focus set to 21 focus points. I didn't want to let the camera have total control of what would be the main subject. Picture control was set to vivid. I also set my camera to focus priority. I usually set my priority focus point in the upper center part of the frame. That way I keep the subjects heads at the top of the frame rather than in the middle and I don't usually cut off their feet or heads.
Because I want my images to all be in focus, the focus priority setting will prevent the camera from firing if it can't get the images in the frame in focus. This can be a bit exasperating when you want a shot and the camera won't work. I've learned that if I keep my focal length between 70mm and 200mm the focus points work well. If I go wider and use something between 18mm and 50mm or so, the camera is not likely to find a focus point and will delay shooting. I sometimes press the AE-L/AF/L button to force the shutter to fire in these instances and when I need the wider shot.
I use a 4GB Sandisk Ultry II CompactFlash card that reads at 15mb/s. It works well and has never failed. At the settings I used on the camera I still had about half of the cards capacity left by the time the game ended.
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