Faugheen 2008
I went to the practice session for tomorrow’s Faugheen 50 road races this afternoon. They were very fortunate with the good weather - I got sunburned, which is quite rare in this part of the world! Last year it rained pretty much non-stop.
Anyways, I brought my camera with me and took several hundred photos. As usual, most of them were horrendous, out of focus messes. I picked 20 of the better ones and stuck them up on flickr.
Here’s a sample:
Click it for full size.
muppet on July 27th, 2008
Yeah, that’s the beauty of shooting digital, snapping away like a man possessed.
It’s been annoying me recently though, having to sift through 10 photos of exactly the same thing, trying to decide which I prefer… I’ve gotta cut that shit out.
The thing I’d liked to have seen from these shots is one of those photos where you track the moving object… keeping it in focus, leaving the background with motion blur.
I’ve never had the opportunity to try this myself so I dunno how hard it is to do, but it looks pretty cool… capturing the sense of speed.
Actually, I saw some pics recently of some rally… crazy bastard spectators standing in the middle of the road taking pics of the oncoming cars… absolute nutters.
Steve on July 27th, 2008
I tried that last year at Faugheen. Its actually quite hard
Here’s the best one I got out of many, many attempts:
muppet on July 28th, 2008
Jesus yeah, just looking at that one, I can’t think of what someone could do to get it any better than that apart from either being lucky or judging the fly-by speed and trajectory extremely well.
It’s definitely an interesting challenge though!
Steve on July 28th, 2008
I’d say its a lot easier if you have the driver/motorcyclist cooperating with the photographer - i.e. posing the photo
Just get them to cruise along at 10-15mph and you could probably still make it look like they’re going very fast in the picture.
muppet on July 28th, 2008
Hmm yeah that might be it alright, or maybe they pull up beside them in a vehicle, match their speed exactly and take a few shots.
It seems like there’s ridiculously little room for error with panning from the road-side.
Maybe there’s a shutter speed sweet-spot for this sort of thing.
Steve on July 28th, 2008
I’d imagine there is - too fast and the wheels look frozen and the background won’t blur. Too slow and the whole thing will look like shite. I used 1/125 for the one above, according to the EXIF.