It's been unseasonably warm and dry here in the Pacific Northwet (no, I did not mispell that) and yesterday was no exception.
Despite some mechanical difficulties with the photo project car I did make the 180 mile trek to Portland International Raceway to try out the new camera. The journey was well worth it from both a photographic and a motorsports standpoint.
Camera PerformanceIn a single word,
flawless. Well, nearly flawless. During the first 100 frames or so shot I had three seperate instances of an 'Error 99' condition that would hand up the camer requiring me to turn it off then back on again and in one case remove the battery to clear the condition.
I'm not sure how many frames I lost during those incidents but they were far from enjoyable. It seemed to have something to do with the shutter. Perhaps it was due to the camera being new because after the three instances I continued to shoot for the remainder off the day (about 800 frames) without a hitch. In fact at no point, despite leaning on the shutter release pretty hard, did I run out of frame buffer and have to wait for it to write to my relativly slow (20x) cards.
There are three auto-focus modes on this camera and unfortunatly I was about 1/2 way though the day before I reliezed I was using the incorrect setting, 'One Shot'. This is why I try to do some shakedown events before the big paying gigs start with the regular racing season.
That is not to say these track day events are not important. In fact I enjoy them as much if not more than the bit international events. Access to participants is unlimited, there are no crowds to fight. It's a very relaxing way to shoot pics and try out some new techniques and not have to worry about a client/editor questioning the more experimental of compositions.
Digressing, the camera is a joy to work with. The added weight over the 300D was not an issue at and the added rubber grip areas on the body are well located making it very easy to handle.
The massive (compared to what I am used too) frame buffer and quick 5 fps made action shots far easier to compose but I did burn though 2.5 GB of memory in less than 3 hours. Much faster than I had expected! No problem, memory is pretty cheap these days.
Having only had less than 24 hours to really familiarize myself with the body before the shoot and having to arise at 4:45am to make the track on time, reading the manual was a luxury I was not able to enjoy before my trial-by-fire test. Thus, as mentioned before I was working with the AF setting most of the day.
The cars were moving along the track at a fast pace so once I switched over to AI Servo and AI Focus did things quite literaly maintain a much better focus.
My inital impressions of the camera's performance and ease of menu navigation gives the camer a 9 of 10. I don't know that there will ever be a perfect camera for me but this one is pretty nice and quite affordable compared to the 1D line of bodies.
ExperimentationAs mentioned I spent a good portion of the afternoon experimenting around with some techniques other track photographers I've met suggested and I'll give a short review of them here.
Slow shutter speedAfter having a number of my photos reviewed one of the tips given me was to show down my shutter speed. Typically I shoot at the faster speed that ISO 100 and light allows. This does a great job of keeping things sharp but it tends to freeze the spokes of wheels and give the meachine an almost 'parked' feel to them robbing the images of action.
Taking this into consideration I slowed my speed to approximatly 1/4 of my normal speeds for most of the day. Granted some of the sharpness issues were panning errors on my part and the spokes of wheels certainly did become more blurred I found the sharpenss of the images especially in cases of near on-axis approach/departuer left too much blur in the rest of the subject as well. Next time out I'll not cut the speed down so much and see how that affects the way wheels look. I'll post some example pics later on this week as I do have over 1000 images to review and process.
Angles, mixing things up a bitAnother suggestion was that the images although framed well lacked a certain amount of artistic expression. Not one to deny expressing myself I cut loose with new angles and camera possitions and realy learned some interesting things.
One lesson that supprised me was that shooting from track level is not always the most interesting. In fact I found some of track-level images quite horrid (and I promise will never see the light of a CRT if I can help it) and some of the images I like best (especially from Turn 9) were taken atop the grand stands.
A few notable exceptions were the images of a Porsche 911 losing control and heading straight towards me before the driver regained control at the last moment spreaying dust and rock into the air. Outside of that, most of the track level images taken in turns 1, Festival and 9 where quite unremarkable until I started to introduce some more tilt to the camera off the 'normal' horizontal orientation.
Playing around with the off angle provided some very pleasing results.
*More to come...
