Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

Will,

Congrats on the RARA media pass.

But where are the rest of your best Laguna Seca pics????

You said you took 1000s?

I'm still editing them. I could post a few that I posted to FB, but the compression that FB does doesn't do them justice. Here are a few anyway. I'm processing pics on both my laptop and desktop. I'm going as fast as I can.











Will

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

This is at 420mm with an F4, again cropped some.

Pay attention to shutter speeds, and chimp a lot between races. Getting the exposure right, taking into account avoiding blown highlights as well getting the shadow detail you want, can be difficult and twitchy. Lots of white airplanes out there. Monitor your results as you go to be sure you are getting what you want to get.
Take LOTS of memory and don't forget a spare battery or two. I used to go through a battery in a day and a half at most, and often less than a day with chimping.

Neal

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

I really like BMW racers. I owned half a dozen Bimmers over the years. Thanks for these...

Don't get too worked up about the cars. They can be posted any time. You have Reno to get ready for, and you want to be relaxed and focussed (so to speak) on getting the most out of your pylon experience. If you get too scattered and hyper now you won't be at your best for the REAL races.

By the way -- if you want to be at your best go easy on the beer and parties at Reno. Drunk and partying at midnight and hungover and struggling at 9 AM does NOT help your photography -- right Wayne?

Neal

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

I really like BMW racers. I owned half a dozen Bimmers over the years. Thanks for these...

Don't get too worked up about the cars. They can be posted any time. You have Reno to get ready for, and you want to be relaxed and focussed (so to speak) on getting the most out of your pylon experience. If you get too scattered and hyper now you won't be at your best for the REAL races.

By the way -- if you want to be at your best go easy on the beer and parties at Reno. Drunk and partying at midnight and hungover and struggling at 9 AM does NOT help your photography -- right Wayne?

Neal

I need to get lightroom cleaned out from the Monterey pics before I can move onto the Reno stuff. I have Monterey going on the desktop, and a local autocross going on the laptop (was trying to shoot as many pics as I could in order to get used to the lens. Speaking of, for Monterey I kept tapping the lens shade on the fences around the track I don't know how many shots I blew from it, but its a good number. (I see a pattern, one sharp and clear, the next blurred in an odd direction, the next is clear ect. ) The stuff from the autoX seems to be pretty consistent. The BMWs racing were really cool. I have an E30 M3 and they had 5 of them racing. Up till that point I had never seen one race in person.

I don't drink so I don't have to worry about that. Still, I've been in the pits till after midnight the past 4 years so it ends up being a late night anyway.

Will

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

A couple more from Monterey.






Will

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

Good stuff, Will. I loved all those E-30 cars, and especially that first M3. A guy I knew was trying to shoehorn that big 4 cyl into a 2002. Last I heard he was trying to decide whether to cobble up a fuel injection setup or carburetors, and it was all turning into a big can of worms. I moved and lost track of the project, but I always thought that engine in a 2200 pound car would be a monster...

Thanks for the trip back in time -- Vintage Racing is good for that.

Neal

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

One more bit of advice for Reno (and I'm sure I'm boring you to death with all this). Don't be too married to the idea that you have to have the whole airplane in a picture. Often you can get really muscular, really dramatic shots with tight cropping that emphasizes the shapes, or the pilot.

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

One more bit of advice for Reno (and I'm sure I'm boring you to death with all this). Don't be too married to the idea that you have to have the whole airplane in a picture. Often you can get really muscular, really dramatic shots with tight cropping that emphasizes the shapes, or the pilot.

Neal,
I am never bored with your advice. I've been looking at your stuff for as long as this site has been around. I always enjoy getting inside advice or ideas from those people who have been there and done that. Part of my quest to learn how to capture the sense of movement and speed came from looking at pics posted on here over the years. Yours, Victor Archers, everyone's. I have to be honest, much of what I shoot these days is influenced by what I have seen here. I don't want to copy other peoples stuff, but I do try to incorporate different aspects of different photographer's styles.
Shooting from the pylons is going to be a new challenge. On one hand, I'm super excited, on the other I'm a little worried that I'm going to shoot a whole lot of crap. haha. I've gotten so used to shooting from distance and getting my panning timing right that shooting up close is going to be a big step up in a lot of ways. That said, I can't wait to shoot the F1 and Bipes. I've never had enough lens to get anything good from the pit wall. The dawn patrol shots I hope will be really cool as well.

The BMW E30s really are fantastic cars. I've put 50K miles on my M3 since i bought it in 2011. Its been a fantastic car with really no major issues. (There have been some issues that are simply due to the car being 28 years old, like the rear suspension bushings. I need to replace those. I'm not looking forward to that job. I'm thinking 3 days at least.) Still, the design of both the normal E30 and the M3 are just so, right. The proportions are great, visibility is great, and the interiors hold up well. I see some with nearly 300K miles on them and the interior still looks ok. They really were the last of the well built BMWs in my book.

Will

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

You will shoot a lot of crap -- I guarantee it. Nobody ever sees my rejects. For me at least, Pylon work was always an extremely low percentage deal. If I had a 10 or 15% keeper rate I thought I was doing great (keeper being stuff like I'm posting here; my personal standards are pretty high). I have more than once finished a race without getting a single publishable image. This kind of photography is hard -- in my experience a lot more difficult than car racing, for instance. Things are happening in 3 dimensions, and the approach speeds are tremendous (Hey, this IS Racing). Think about body position -- do you start your pan facing the approaching aircraft? If you do that what do you do as the airplane passes you? You can end up twisted like a pretzel, and pretzels are not inherently stable. You're standing on uneven ground with bushes all around -- you don't want to be moving your feet much while looking through the viewfinder. Now you've got to think about the next aircraft approaching (if it hasn't already gone by), or maybe there's a pair behind that one. You can't do a lot of zooming as the airplane passes -- that's not very stable either.

Like I said -- not easy. But the problems are solvable -- just look at Victor's stuff. Just keep thinking, and adjusting technique as you find what works. It's obviously incredibly rewarding when the stars align and you get the keepers. If you're calm and thoughtful about how it's all playing out you will get great stuff.

Be patient, and be forgiving of yourself if you only like 10% or 25% or what ever of the shots you take. That just means you're no better than the rest of us out there.

And just wait til you get that perfectly composed shot with the killer light and you can see the hairs in the pilot's mustache and read the numbers on the instruments -- and you cut the nose off. That's when you've really become a classic pylon photographer...

Neal

[AAFO_WSagar]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

I've yet to master the only version of Nikon Capture that completely works with the D4, but.....

Pylon/Airplane shots can be fun!

Shot with 200-400

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

Yes, I'm familiar with figuring out how to stand, and the fact that the planes are moving in 3 dimensions. I'll just be shooting from a new perspective. Here are a few of my shots from last year.








Those were all taken with my 70-300 from the hillside. Way out of the really useful range of the lens. Now I'll be closer, and getting the view into the cockpit rather than the underside of the plane. I think by the afternoon I should have the timing down to where I'm pretty consistent. I don't know that I'll be shooting at 1/125 like most of these shots were, but its hard to say.

I have 2 batteries, a 32gb card and 3 16 gb cards. I'm a little worried that I'll run out of both. Hopefully I can find a place where I can plug my battery charger in, and if push comes to shove I can store photos from the card to my laptop and move them back to my desktop before processing them.

Will

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

The press office has outlets -- you should be able to do some charging there. The problem, of course is that the office is open when the races are happening and you don't want to leave a charger and battery unattended. I've often used an inverter plugged into the car power outlet and charged batteries in the car going back and forth to town. If you're camping, the problem is that most car power outlets only work with the key turned on. If you chimp much I doubt if two batteries will give you more than 3 days max before you need to do something. You don't want to have your last battery die midafternoon on Sunday! This is not one to take chances on.

80 gigs is quite a bit of storage. I don't think I ever went through that much at Reno, but I don't shoot bursts. I know birds in flight guys who need to shoot bursts a lot who could easily burn through 80 gigs in a couple of days.

I'm a big believer in redundancy. Each night of the Races I downloaded all the day's shoot into my laptop AND downloaded all of it again onto a WD Passport external drive. One copy stayed in the hotel and one copy was stored (protected from heat) in the car at Stead each day. I thus started each day with empty cards. Now I'm an extreme paranoid when it comes to fear of losing stuff that will never be repeated. Each photographer has to make his own decisions about their comfort level on this. I've never totally trusted flash memory, and have always been most comfortable getting images off the camera cards and on to redundant hard drives as soon as possible, but each shooter's mileage may vary on these questions. If you are in a position timewise to download stuff as you go your cards will be just fine.

I know you know this one, but be VERY careful about card management. Those dinky little SD cards that I think your camera uses are very easy to lose. Press shooting at Reno can be chaotic -- you're constantly on the move, from Press office to pylons to ramp, back to Press room over to the Formula 1 hangar etc etc. Have a system for storing and transporting cards safely.

If you expect to produce professional level results, think like a pro. Never assume, and never take anything for granted.

Neal

[T. Adams]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

300 prime on a 1.6 crop body. Photo is not cropped, I hate cropping.


500 prime on crop body. No cropping.


300 prime on crop body. No cropping.


300 prime on full frame body.


Full frame is generally reserved for ground stuff I am finding, although for sportscar racing I use both all the time. 99% of the time I have two bodies with me.

[RAD2LTR]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

So looking through more of my images from the Historics, 1/200 seems to be the sweet spot for panning car racing shots.
I had a very high success rate with this shutter speed.





Will

[wingman]

Re: Need Expert Advise on 500mm Lense Set-up

Those look really good -- good wheel blur, and just enough background panning blur to isolate the subject a bit.. Nice cars, too.

Neal