...none of which is on line yet. But I spent all day yesterday shooting motorcycle roadracing.
Living in Pittsburgh now, I'm less than two hours' drive from my old home track of Nelson Ledges (you can read a little about it here: http://www.superbikeplanet.com/2004/Jul/onthisweek10.htm) and I found out some friends would be racing there this weekend. Since I also have a *real* gig shooting the AMA Superbike races at Mid-Ohio (for Superbikeplanet.com) in two weeks, I thought I could kill several birds with one stone by taking a day trip to shoot some racing. I could practice my motorsports photography skills (which have become quite rusty as it's a long time since I've done any of this kind of work), I could get a good idea of how to do this kind of thing in digital *and* I could catch up with old friends. Now I'm back home, tired and sunburned but I accomplished all three goals. The FA*80-200/2.8 seemed to suit about 90% of my shots. The FOV factor on the ist-D makes it a much more viable "one lens solution" for motorsports than it is on a film camera. I used a 1.4x teleconverter with good results quite often, too. I think that the 300/2.8 might get more use at a track like Mid-Ohio but we'll see. I really worked on my hand holding and panning technique a lot. The difference between my first shots and those taken at the end of the day was dramatic :) Workflow was no big problem. With all those "blurred background panning shots", average file size (in JPEG mode) was really quite small, even at the max quality JPEG setting: I got over 200 shots on a 512 meg CF card! That got me through morning with no problem and I dumped the card's contents onto my laptop computer during lunch. With two CF cards on hand I can afford to shoot even more. I took about 550 shots yesterday. I probably won't be so "conservative" at Mid-Ohio in two weeks. One of my old racing buddies is now the quasi-official track photographer at Nelson ledges and has quite an operation going. He shoots whenever he's not racing himself (he almost missed one of his races yesterday because he was shooting the prior race) with a Canon 10D and cheap 70-210 zoom. He has an ancient Pentium (100MHz or so!) laptop and two Epson 2000p printers and sells photos to the racers. Looks like he does pretty well with this little business. Hope to have some of my shots on line this evening (I have to go to work at my real job now!) I'm really looking forward to Mid-Ohio at this point but I'm *very* glad I did the shakedown run yesterday. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
