Tuesday morning and I'm almost recovered from the past two weeks. For those of you who remember that far back, I went to Ohio on the weekend of July 24-25 to cover the AMA Superbike Championship races at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course for Superbikeplanet.com. This in the midst of preparing for an arts festival the following weekend at which I hoped to sell many prints and make a small fortune on which to retire. (Yeah, right.)
Anyway, the experience at Mid-Ohio was very good. It was my first high-pressure (meaning "deadline-driven, no #&$%-ups allowed") job to be done digitally. All my equipment worked flawlessly and I got my workflow sorted out very well by the end of the weekend. I'd shoot from the beginning of the day until lunchtime, then head up to the press tower where I'd dump all the images onto my laptop PC, pick out a few of the best, perform a rudimentary Photoshop job and upload them to the editor before heading out for the afternoon to repeat the process. My basic Photoshop cleanup generally consisted of cropping a little bit, adjusting levels, resizing, unsharp mask and then saving as a progressive JPEG in a new directory. Much of this I had automated by writing Photoshop Actions the week before. The press center had high speed Internet connections so the uploading was pretty painless. I even checked the PDML a couple of times :) I got a whole day on one set of Powerex AA NiMH batteries with juice to spare. (I changed to a fresh set for Sunday's shooting anyway!) It's amazing how long these batteries will last if you don't spend much time reviewing shots on the camera's LCD. At the end of the day, I'd repeat the whole select/edit/upload business, but take a little more time and care with it since there were actual races (rather than just practice sessions) involved, and I could work without the time constraints of a one hour lunch break. Then it was off to check in at my hotel and try to find a place to buy some beverage. Mid-Ohio is, as the name implies, in the middle of Ohio. Ever tried to find good beer in the middle of Ohio? I think Budweiser is considered a high end beer. After much searching I found a gourmet supermarket of sorts, procured some Irish stout and retired to my room to decompress. Sunday was more of the same but with less of a feeling of pressure because I knew I'd done it before :) The editor turned out to be more interested in photos of racers, crew and fans in the paddock than in action shots of the racing itself, so I spent more time walking around watching the watchers. Getting the racing itself was more fun and depended greatly on knowing the circuit and where the best views were. It helped that I'd been there before and relations with the officials were good because the corner marshals there are from CRC (Competition Race Control), several of whom I know from my own days as a motorcycle racer. The racing wasn't quite as good on Sunday, but my photos were better. I think you could shoot an event like this entirely with the 80-200/2.8 (on a 1.5x DSLR) if you had to, especially if you had a 1.4 or 1.7 teleconverter in your bag as well. The 300/2.8 was good for a few shots but not essential. I saw one guy with a 600 and it seemed like overkill to me. I definitely like working with the Pentax 1.7x AF teleconverter because of the way it limits focus range. I also found myself taking advantage of high ISO settings and using manual focus quite a bit by going for a relatively slow shutter speed and small aperture and zone focusing. With panning you get the blurred background of narrow DOF anyway! The photos used by Superbikeplanet are on line here (I'll have more on my own web site this weekend): http://www.superbikeplanet.com/image/2004ama/midohio/1/ http://www.superbikeplanet.com/image/2004ama/midohio/6/ After Mid-Ohio I spent a frantic week preparing display prints and getting prints ready to sell at the Arts on the River festival in Morgantown, WV. It wasn't quite as good as last year: I didn't win the prize for a body of work this year... because no one did. Seems they eliminated the prizes entirely :( Still, I sold enough prints to make it worthwhile. Several people asked if I was shooting digital. I told them that most of my work on display was film but some was digital. Slightly to my surprise, none of them asked which were which. I sold two framed 12 x 18 prints (in 18 x 24 frames): One was film one was digital. Got a lot of good feedback from people and got invited to two other arts festivals. I think I'll do one of them but I'm still too tired to want to think about it at this point! Now I have to head down to Duquesne University and register for classes. I start work on the masters degree in three weeks. Just about enough time to catch my breath, I think. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
