July Heat Solo @ Stroud
This weekend I went out to Stroud for another local autocross event. It wasn’t too hot and this time I brought adequate sun protection (hats, sunblock, etc.). This is also a trip report for my first full outing with the 5d mark 2 and the 100-400mm Canon lens. I had a lot of fun and filled up 24GB of memory cards.
The whole set of photos is now up at my SmugMug gallery where prints can be made from. A more concise set of photos is viewable here at Flickr. To summarize: there were lots of nice looking cars there.
Panning with the new lens was harder than I expected. The 100-400 is heavy and the push-pull action is hard to get used to. I kept grabbing the focusing ring instead of the grip you’re supposed to use for zooming. I got used to it as the day went along but it took effort and my arms got tired holding the whole setup outstretched.
The 5d mark 2 got hot in the sun, eventually becoming painful to touch. It’s black and absorbs a lot of heat. Awhile back a friend was telling me about the Canon L glass and why they are all white. I honestly just thought it was a marketing strategy to isolate the different product lines. My friend instead told me it had to do with heat absorption issues, that since L glass was white it absorbs less heat from the sun. I can see that totally making sense now. It doesn’t make sense why Canon makes their other produces with black plastic on the outsides, but oh well.
While out I started to branch out from just panning shots and pictures of cars. I tried to incorporate more of the atmosphere surrounding the event. Pictures of photos with people interacting with their automobiles. While the shots are not totally great, I think its a good start.
Sadly, I miscalculated how much memory I had to work with between the two race heats. I thought I had evenly distributed my memory cards between morning and afternoon but instead I had allocated 16 gigs for the morning and then only 8 gigs for the afternoon. I still shots photos for the afternoon but instead opted to fill up the memory cards shooting video towards the end of the day. I’m not good at video, but practice will get me there.
Youtube is down for uploads right now, so here is a link to a gigantic file (400+ megabytes) of the video I shot in HD. I’ll upload smaller versions to youtube and post another message on this blog when the file is ready there. There is a noticeable dust spot right in the center of the frame on the film. I think I was shooting in Tv mode, with the aperture stopped all the way down which is why the dust became visible. I’m not totally sure though to be honest.
I’m looking forward to the next event, and I want to get out more and shoot more sporting events in the area.
Gallery on Flickr (just the really good shots)
Gallery at Smugmug (many more shots available for purchase)
Autocross event website