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The Event
The 2015 Lone Star Le Mans(AKA: the World Endurance Championship and Tudor Touring car races) was on September 17th to the 19th this year. The weather was good, maybe just a bit too hot really. In addition to the WEC and Tudor races there was also the Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo North America series. All Lamborghinis against Lamborghinis. Unfortunatly the race on Friday started at 8am, so I arrived just as it finished. To be honest I didn't stay at the track for all of any of the races. For some reason I just wasn't into it this year. It was still a good event, just not as exciting for me as the previous years. |
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Photo Notes
So this year I spent more time in the paddocks and took part in the Continental Sports Car Challange grid walk on Friday. I took quite a few photos but found most of them too boring to post. I also spent some time shooting through the fence at turns 17/18. I also found most of those shots to be rather dull and unexciting so didn't post any of them. Just a horizon with the back end of a car or 2. For some reason, just like with watching the races, I had a hard time really getting into taking photos of the event. Especailly on Friday. Saturday I was more of the mind to enjoy taking the photos, but even that was tempered by the fact that COTA had started setting up the temporary bleachers for F1 and they were blocking some of my favorite photo spots. AND just to really piss me off, in several areas that they didn't manage to block with bleachers, they put up signs on the fence between the viewing are and the track totaly blocking the views of the chicanes, where you get some of the best shots of cars. The same for the short straight between turns 6 and 7. I was actually pretty unhappy with the event as a spectator. And on Sunday when I got an email asking me to take a survey about the event, I shared my thoughts with them. It took lots of restraint to not use lots of four letter words. |
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The Photography
I tried out a few settings on the camera that I haven't used much yet, such as Aperture Priority and Shutter Speed Priority. I don't think those are all that great for this kind of sporting event. They seem to create very static and boring images by reducing the motion blur too much. I tried to recreate the "over the fence and through the photographer hole" technic I discoverd at MotoGP. I had some success. Unfortunatly there were LOTS of proffesional photographers using the holes so I didn't always have a clear shot. It was at the end of the day, just as the sun was setting, that I snuck into the closed bleachers at the end of the long back straight and just before turn 12. Even before the sun set you could see the brake rotors of the front wheels glowing. But for about 20 minutes on each side of the sunset there was a "sweet spot" of just enough light to take photos and still see the glow really well. These are at the end of my gallery and are were the funnest shots to try and get. Especially when I tried to track the front wheel zoomed all the way out to 300mm. Since I was so close to the track, I was maybe 2 rows up in the bleachers, the tire and front 1/4 of the car filled the shot. They are slowing down from well over 200mph to maybe 40 or 50 mph for turn 12 at that point. So tracking them fully zoomed in with such a drastic change in speed was a fun challange. |
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