Champ car, montréal 2004

[nrondeau]

There's my Champ car photo with my D70 and his very slow autofocus for that kind of picture and my VR 70-200.

Tell me what you think about it.

http://www.pbase.com/nrondeau/champ2004

[stevenoz]

Great job! I looked at your whole gallery.

I recently did some auto racing pictures at the American LaMans race at Elkhart Lake http://www.pbase.com/stevenoz/elkhart_lake_2004

What did you do for your metering and white balance. It looked like you may have also been fighting a grayish color problem as well. I shot with my D70 also and really noticed that the whit balance and exposure were quite dark. I was thinking maybe due to the gray color of the track?

Let me know if you also experienced the same issue and if you overcame it?

Steve

[nrondeau]

Well, i got a lot of problem with my autofocus, it was so slow, i was'nt able to just wait for the right moment and clic, i did like 2 or 3 autofocus when the car was aproching and i finally get some good one. Do you have any problem like that with your's d70 ?

[bobt54]

Both you guys have excellent auto racing galleries. In the next few weeks I will be creating some of my own when I go to Richmond and Dover for the Nascar races.

The "problem" with some of these pictures is that they were shot with such a high shutter speed that they appear parked on the track. Nicolas, I thought your best shots was where they locked up the breaks.

My favorite pictures in both galleries were the ones shot at a slower shutter speed where the tires are blurred but the car remains in focus.

I particularly like the one that you did, Steve, where you appeared to follow the car with the camera as the background was blurred but the car remains in focus. Is that what happened or did you "help" it a little with some creative post image processing? Either way, nicely done.

[stevenoz]

Well, i got a lot of problem with my autofocus, it was so slow, i was'nt able to just wait for the right moment and clic, i did like 2 or 3 autofocus when the car was aproching and i finally get some good one. Do you have any problem like that with your's d70 ?

Nrondeau,

Make sure you set your auto focus to "C" for continuess focus. That way you camera auto focus will follow the car and it will always be in focus.

I particularly like the one that you did, Steve, where you appeared to follow the car with the camera as the background was blurred but the car remains in focus. Is that what happened or did you "help" it a little with some creative post image processing? Either way, nicely done

For those shots what I did was use Shutter Priority on the camera and I set the shutter speed either at 200-320 depending on how far I was zoomed on the car. At 300mm it is much more difficult to keep the car in the view finder as it is passing. For the shots where I was closer to the track and not zoomed so far I lowered it to like 200. I deleted many images at the track that didn't even look good on the camera display and only kept the ones that looked good. I took 500 pictures at the track and ended up with about 125 or so that are real nice.

Thanks for the complement

Steve

[clickhead]

nice shots in your gallery.

You had a nice angle on those corner shots, really showing how deep they go onto the rumble strips.

You can see the difference in lines taken

http://www.pbase.com/clickhead