To finish this off for now I've inculded a couple of shots I took last night, I tried the zoom lens with no results at all, then I put on the short lens and although I got a couple of decent landscape images I just couldn't up the apeture to the required f stop to get decent action pics even when it was close to me. The other thing was even at ISO 1600 I was still limited to a 1/250 shutter speed at best, the results soon diminished when I tried 1/500 and faster

I think for now I will leave my football photography to daylight only and might revisit floodlight photography when I can afford a lens to suit the conditions.

I like the second one. a familiar type shot like this works very well with the goal and netting in the foreground....especially if you either get the action at your end, or a bored looking goalkeeper looking round at you.
cheers
joe

Cheers Joe, I will take the camera along to evening games but I don't think I'll be using it that often, perhaps I'll concentrate on the personalities (like most non league football clubs, we seem to have more than our fair share) in the ground watching rather than what is happening on the pitch. At least I've have proved to myself that it can be done with my limited setup which I didn't believe before I joined up here

Right! I took myself up to our local glider club this morning hoping to improve my technique, I ended up with very mixed results but in the main I'm disapointed with myself as I still seem to be suffering from blurring on a lot of the images.

To start with the first two pictures I reasonably happy with and from this mornings total of 170 shots taken I guess I have around two dozen that I would say are sharpe and in focus, I used the EF 70-300mm. Is the lack of focus down to the matrix system or is it still me?

PS: I've just found a piece of software on my PC that came with the other Canon software and it handily shows me the focus points on each image, I notice when the image is slighty out of focus only one of the AF points is on the target I wish to take the photograph of, perhaps I should reset this to focus from one AF point only rather than the nine which the auto AF uses as a default setting. My apologies if this is getting boring.

What's the problem with these Trevor? They all look to be in focus to me. You've stripped the EXIF data from the files again, so it's more difficult for us to be able to advise what the problem may be. The third image is in focus, but the subject is distant and it's hazy. The perceived poor focus is more to do with the weather I think than anything wrong with your camera settings.

The exif is still missing because I'm still using Photoshop 5.5 which I hope to sort out in the future.

It must be me concerning the last picture then, it wasn't that hazy but the glider was a fair distance from me, perhaps I should not be so paranoid ;)

Some good advise given

yelvetoft the exif is there ,you just have to click on the image to put it on a blank page to read it. :)

Hi Trevor.
They look good to me. A bit of creative cropping of your results could get some supperb results.
Yes, perhaps try single point AF as I suggested earlier. If you have that single point over the part you want in perfect focus, the results you get should be more predictable and hopefully less hit and miss. I think the bird photographers use this pretty much all of the time
Good luck
cheers
Joe

Cheers Joe, I'm out most days 'practicing' mainly on static objects, buildings etc and I think I'm getting there. My main problem still seems to be composition and I must get round to trying a single point AF

Tele lenses accentuate haze at a distance, I feel that a touch of levels would improve matters. Worth trying anyway.