| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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The Crystal Palace video was lovely, comparing that with the ultra secure circuit at Donington is from the sublime to the ridiculous. The trouble is it's very hard to present a cohesive argument against safety, no matter how inconvenient it may be for photography. Each year even tighter regulations further increase the safety both for competitors and spectators. Usually the result is more expense and less access. Motorsport is inherently dangerous, that's obvious, yet there is no end in sight for the tinkering and tightening of the regulations related to safety. That was one of the reasons I gave up competing in 1988. </rant>
Back on Topic...
I tried two techniques depending on the corner. With the longer shots I cranked the shutter speed up to 1/1,000 sec, in M, using f 11 to maximise the DoF and used auto ISO to control the exposure. This is novel for me, with the D200 I had to keep the lens wide open to keep the ISO max at 400 and to get a decent shutter speed in Aperture priority.
The second technique was to reduce the shutter speed to 1/200 sec to show the wheel rotation and background panning blur but I found that if the cars were bouncing on the track it made the back of the car have vertical blurring.
I had planned to refine the settings on Saturday racing to get sufficient wheel and background blur, AND a sharp car.
What impresses me is, given I was using a manual focus 300mm lens, the extreme cropping and the nature of the subject, the detail like the sill sticker text, is amazing. This is from 12Mp images. I can't imagine ever needing more detail than that, these are very heavy crops, yet they are perfectly usable images. I think they could probably be resampled upwards to increase the pixel count for printing quite large, although I haven't tried that. I have NOT applied any sharpening to any of the D3 images in this thread, beyond a touch (24%) of 'Clarity' and a little 'Dehaze'.
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Robert.