| I had a general admission ticket for the Sunday F1 race this year. Overall I found the event to be rather anti-climactic. Basically if you don't want to spend the $300-$400 on bleacher seats I think you are better off just staying home and watching it on TV.
My issue was with that they installed so many bleachers, which were NOT full, that there really was no good spot to watch for general admission, and there were very long walks between the most decent of the GA spots. And of the decent spots to watch the race only 1 really lent itself to photography. Fortunately it's a 2 hour long race so if you were up to a 1/4 to 3/4 mile walk then you had time to move from spot to spot. And beyond that, compared to other racing events at COTA, there wasn't much else happening. Normally not much more than an hour goes by without there being something to watch on the track. At F1 there was huge stretches of time between events. Which explains why so many people showed up not long before the race and then left right after. So basically if you go general admission you pay like $75/hour to watch the race. And that's if you didn't pay $100 to park. But to be fair the race teams probably pay close to $500,000/hour or more to race. So i should probably not bitch too much about that. LOL
I opted to station myself between turns 8 and 9, which was the best GA place to take photos. It would have been a great spot if they hadn't been for this 1 damn tree. It's the only tree in the entire compound that is next to the track. And it's in the only spot you can see a good section of track OVER the fence.
Anyway, enough of my ranting. Despite my complaints about not having a good vantage point I still managed to take just over 4300 photos. (have I mentioned I love digital cameras?) Out of those I came away with 60 photos that i actually think are decent. None of them are great in my opinion. As I discovered upon reviewing the photos the heat from the track and the cars engines created a lot of distortion. On a few shots I think this actually looks really good. On the shots where the car is heading straight at the camera you can see a blur around and above the car. That's the heat refraction not bad focusing.
So.... to comment on and explain a few specific photos.
First a word about the focal lengths listed and the image you see. There is some MAJOR cropping going on in some of these images, so that data isn't exactly accurate for the final image. For example photo 06. I cropped away about 2/3 of the original image.
The first photo is during the Ferrari Challenge race. The white car spun out and ended up facing the on coming traffic. I managed to get a couple of shots at the end of the spin.
The second photo was taken during the very first lap of the race. One car came into turn 8 a little too fast and smoked his tires under breaking, causing the car behind him to do the same.
Photos 03 thru 08 are some of the better focused shots (least heat refraction) but I felt the background and foreground where to busy and drew your eye away from the cars. So I added a bit of blur to smooth them out. If you look at other photos from the same point of view you'll see what i mean.
Photos 09 thru 14 really surprised me. It was toward the end of the race and I started playing with camera settings. I thought for sure they were toss away shots when I reviewed them on the camera. If you look at the EXIF data on the image page you'll see that the ISO is really low and the shutter speeds are super slow. Like at the edge hand held ability slow. (I didn't have a tripod or even a mono-pod) Add to that that I had really high F-Stop (small lens opening) and I ended up with very dark photos. When I opened them in Adobe Lightroom and adjusted the exposure you get the photos you see. That's all I did to them, big adjustments to brightness and contrast settings. I really like the ghosting and streaking effects it had on the people and all the visual junk in the image.
One last thing. There are 2 videos at the bottom of the gallery. Just to give anyone that wasn't there a feel for what the 2 hour race was like. Put your head phones on and turn it up really really loud to get the full effect. LOL
Enjoy. |
