Nikon D3 and 200-400mm f4 VR for a weekend

A couple of weekends ago Nikon Professional Services were kind enough to lend me a Nikon D3 and the 200-400mm f4 VR zoom lens to play around with.
It was a last minute thing and so I quickly tried to arrange to shoot as much as possible in the two days I had this amazing set up.
In the one weekend I shot a game of Rugby league, Tony Hawk demoing at Monster skatepark, a NSW Premier League Soccer match that evening and the following day I shot a handfull of overs in the final match of the Women's World Cup Cricket, and then another Soccer game that night. I definitely put the camera to the test, especially the high ISO capabilities. Most small club fields in Sydney have terrible lighting and I was shooting at ISO 6400 at f4, and shocked at how well the camera not only handled the noise at that ISO but also how well the camera was able to focus the long lens in such crappy light and keep up. On my D2x when shooting sports like soccer, the keeper rate is probably about 2-3 sharp shots in a burst of 10. The D3 was 9-10 tack sharp in a burst of 10! Seriously worth every cent.The other thing worth noting is how sharp this lens is for a zoom! You would think the images came from a prime 2.8.
It has been pretty hard to go back to the old cameras after using the D3.
Time to sell everything I own!!
lot's more shots after the cut.
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Basketball

SO my flatmate, Chris plays Basketball in a bit of a low key local comp and i figured I'd tag along last night to see if I could get a couple of shots! I've never shot Basketball before and found there were more than a couple of hurdles! More shots and details after the jump. I knew the first issue would be the amount of light in the gymnasium. It is held at a local school so I knew right away the lighting would be lacking. The other problem was the amount of space, there was pretty much two metres between the sidelines and the brick walls of the building, not a lot of room to move around the court. The bricks proved to be a bit distracting too, although one can't always hope for a full stadium with a big out of focus crowd to "clean" up the background!

All these shots were at 2000 ISO! It's not pretty, but even at such a high ISO i couldn't get a fast enough shutter speed to control the action. 8 out of 10 shots had motion blur. !/125th sec was the best i could do wide open @f2.8...

It goes without saying that either I need a D3 or just forget about trying in such lighting conditions.
One other major thing I learned about the limitations of my equipment last night was the old Nikkor 80-200 2.8D series lens really lacks the auto focus performance required for such fast moving/erratic sports.
This was something I already kind of knew, but figured it might work out ok with the odd shot dropped due to the AF not being able to keep up with the frame rate on the camera. It's funny, because this lens has been my most used and abused lens for all my snow and other action sports work, I guess they don't require much focus tracking though!

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