Raceday!

Day 135 and I spent about three hours up in Gimli, MB, shooting the opening race of the MRA motorcycle season. It was a great chance to play with the 70-200, and work on some high shutter speed and panning shots.

The weather was great, but the sun was incredibly bright, so expect some blown skies in the pictures, and a lot of pictures to boot. I shot about 400 exposures, and a good 50% of them are usable, but I picked a few favourites to share.

The pit area was set up with a variety of tents and shades from various competitors and teams:



There were about twenty or so racers all together, and they were kind enough to line up a number of their bikes for me:



Some of the hardware on display was pretty impressive and expensive:



And of course, my friends team, Defiant Motorsports, was in attendance:



You have to love it when the competition flies the Jolly Roger as well:



Now to the racing itself. Initially, I went with some straight high shutter-speed shots. I kept the aperture fairly wide to achieve that, and to blur out the terrain and trailing bikes. This first series was shot in one of the main curves, at f/4, ISO 100 and roughly 1/1600th shutter, manually focused on the tripod:





From there, I moved on to some panning shots on a slower section of the track. It took some fiddling, but I found that my magic exposure was about 1/160th shutter and f/11 still at ISO 100. IS is on in mode 2, which allows for movement in one direction for panning, and I handheld all these shots:







These panning shots worked fairly well, and I kept about 1/3rd of these shots. The bikes were only hitting about 80kph here, so it was a good starting point.

I moved back to the corners for a bit, and tried some different angles to find interesting points to shoot. I actually had to cross the track to get this angle, please don't tell the guys at the MRA.







Finally, a challenge. Panning shots, close in, on the main straightaway. I was about fifteen or twenty feet away and these bikes were hitting 240kph or so at this point. Handheld again, same 1/160th shutter at f/11. This was a challenge, and I kep a lot close to 10% or so of these shots, but I consider the fact that I managed to keep any of the a huge victory. Here are my best two from this section:





All in all, a really fun day, and I got away from the kids for a few hours :D

The 70-200 performed *admirably*. Sharpness is everything I should have asked for, focus was accurate and fast, and the panning mode for IS made my very first attempts successful.

Love.

This.

Lens.

At the crossing...

Day 105 was a day of good omen. There is a pair of shots that I have been wanting to get for at least two months now, and it was going to totally depend on dumb luck (or more planning that I care to do right now) to get them. Well, today I got dumb lucky.





Basically, I go through this train crossing twice a day to and from work, and it's suitably industrial on one side to be urban-grungy while also being adjacent to housing on the other side and as such, isolated enough to shoot without a lot of distractions getting into the shot.

These shots were both taken handheld, so I was leaning against the signal for the shot down the length of the train at 1/15th shutter, and against my car for the shot with the signal at 1/13th shutter. Without the extended shutter speed, these shots wouldn't work so I'm glad I was able to keep still enough with a mono-pod or some such.

Finally, this was not planned as a monochrome set of shots, but the sky was just *dead* today. Good for light, but bad for colour, and it totally dominated the shot and killed the tones in the train. Monochrome seems to allow the subject to stand out better, so I made the switch.

Walking around downtown...

I'm continuing to try and work on my urban shooting, and today was the latest chance I had to do so. The weather outside is wonderful, almost 20 Celsius today, so it's great walk around weather.

Today I wanted to shoot a bus stop, although the shot I kept was sort of on the periphery of the bus stop itself. A quick note too, I'm working on my monochrome work, and some vignetting to get the gritty look going. It's a bit strong in this shot, so I need to improve on it.

Here's the shot for today:



Downtown Winnipeg is really one of those 'mixing' places. At this particular bus stop you will see professionals, drifters, families, impoverished people and hipsters at any given time. Tensions can get a bit high, and the class divisions can be pretty glaring. It's not always pretty, it's sometimes scary, but it's always interesting.

Interesting like the guy who followed about 100 feet behind me as I walked to work this morning, shouting "I'M NOT DEAD!" over and over. I didn't take his picture. Obviously.

The crime rate around here is nuts...

Hello friends, and welcome to day 56 of my Project 365.

I was feeling a bit goofy today, so I decided to try doing something like my Exhibitionst candy shot here, so I decided to once again dive into the seedy side of the life of your average nut:



Thank goodness that they have CCTVs there, maybe the cops can catch the guy who did it.

You can click through to the Flickr link for a larger view, but the full size images is big, 4096 by something, and 9MB. You've been warned.

More shots for Defiant Racing

Here are the other keepers from my late night, really cold shoot for my friends racing team last night.

Comments and criticism are always welcome!

So tired...

It's late and I'm tired. Day 39 meant going to a friend's place and shooting some photos the website of his new motorcycle racing team, Defiant Racing.

I've been PP'ing his shots all night, and now I must sleep. Here is one of the shots from today:



Can I go to bed now?

Winnipeg means snow!

For day 37, my temporarily beloved 24-70 and I went out to shoot light trails. Just one problem: Snow.

I do live in a winter city, so trekking through knee-deep snow to set up a tripod on a snow drift is just second nature, but for long exposures, it *kills* any sharpness you night have had. Add to that the slippery roads reducing traffic, and my light trail shooting had to be aborted early. I also don't have a weather-sealed body so I was using my hat to keep the body dry.

This is the best shot of the night:



Not terrible, but you can see the lack of sharpness if you look at the railing on the overpass, and not once did I manage to get traffic coming and going at the same time.

Today's lesson, take what you can get.

A big week coming up...

As you might remember, I have a rented EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM coming in to do some portrait practice with family friends this week. The lens arrived today, and it is sitting in it's Pelican case at home with my lovely wife. I am itching to go home from work and get it, but I still need a paycheck from my day job!

My rental was arranged with a Canadian company called LensLenders and so far my experience has been excellent. Very good communication, and the lens arrived several days earlier than my rental period is scheduled to begin. They do $99CDN weekend rentals, or $149 a week including shipping both ways, with discounts for additional weeks. They rent a wide variety of Canon and Nikon lenses, and a few Olympus ones as well. So far, I would highly recommend the service.

As is my history with hobbies, I tend to overdo things a bit, so I have also purchased a background support system with 10' x 20' Muslin backdrops in both white and black. As I was chatting about this with friends at the office, one of them has actually asked me to come and shoot some promo photos for his newly formed motorcycle racing team. It's just a local team for a local league, but it's a way to get my name out there.

I never intended to do this as anything more than a hobby, but if people are going to start asking me to do shoots for them, maybe I can make a few bucks on the side evenings and weekends? The only thing stopping me from that idea is a simple question of self confidence. I'm not convinced I'm any good at this yet!

Maybe I'll have some answers by next weekend.

I feel the need...

Day 29 of Project 365 and as always I was looking for inspiration.

Sometimes inspiration comes from a ray of light shining through a window, or a simple little object with striking colours. Sometimes, inspiration tries to beat a red light and just about kills you on the way home from work. Want to guess how my drive home was today?

Don't get me wrong, I'm hardly to worlds best driver. I'm not overly defensive, I can have a bit of a quick temper, and I really don't like driving around people who clearly aren't in full, confident control of their vehicle. Having said all that, I have two kids, and my driving habits have seriously mellowed since I started having little people in the back seat routinely.

Still, every now and then, you feel the need. The need for speed!



Taken in my driveway, ISO 200, f/11 at .8 seconds shutter, 25mm focal length. Although I have been using the 60mm Macro almost exclusively, there was no way I could frame the tach in my car from the front seat, so I switched over to the kit lens. Even with IS I had to brace the lens on the steering wheel, and take several shots before I got a nice sharp one. I wanted a larger blur on the needle, but this was the longest I could manage a handheld sharp shot, and I really didn't want to absolutely floor it in neutral.

All in all, I think I nailed this shot pretty well. It was over-exposed a bit, but easily corrected in post.

p.s. Yeah, it was -17 Celsius at 4pm in Winnipeg today. Brr.

Charge of the scooter brigade!

Well, I managed a shot I'm not completely embarrassed by ;)

Went for a walkabout at lunch today, hoping to spot one of our colourful downtown buskers, or something a little grittier but I didn't turn up much. On the way out though, the scooter brigade had lined up their crafts neatly, and I found an angle that I liked.



This shot is heavily cropped, the original shot I took included almost the whole bodies of the scooters, but I thought the 'odd-man-out' line of headlights looked better tightly cropped. I've read that a picture should tell a story, and I don't know if I achieved that here, but this cropping gives a stronger point of interest compared to the uncropped shot.

The DOF worked out well enough, but in hindsight I should have cranked down the aperture and tried to get sharp focus across all of them. Not a great shot, but if I am going to learn, you have to put the bad out with the good.

I'd like to thank those of you that are following and reading this blog. I hope that I've made it worth your time, since there are a hundred thousand photoblogs out there. Your comments are always welcome and wanted!