Wednesday Tien-Ling and I will be headed to Alice Springs, Australia to spend a week photographing the world's largest outdoor desert race, the Finke Desert Race.
Willing Ambassadors
The very friedly administrative staff at Finke has helped me out in getting better access to the racers than the twelve thousand other spectators will see. We've been given contacts with the American team from the Pine Gap spy satellite base in Alice Springs, Mr Dave Fellows, buggy racer with one of the fastest rides in the whole race, local bike champion Mr. Rick Hall, and finally, three-time Finke Desert Race Champion, Mr. Stephen Greenfield. I'm hoping to get some great race-crew shots and good insight into the hairy details of the 460km roundtrip circuit.
I called a couple of the drivers today, and they were all exceedingly helpful and enthusiastic. It sounds like there is a reasonble chance I may get to view part of the race from a small plane. This could be fantastic. Friday night, at the scrutineering (judges picking over the cars looking for rules violations -- fair-like atmosphere) I'll meet these folks face-to-face and figure out the logistics.
Gear Setup
I've spent the last couple weeks assembling my photo kit, working out the details of how to photograph cars moving 120mph, and the logistical concerns of moving along a 230km track in a 4x4 camper with forty pounds of camera gear and an indulging wife.
Speaking of indulging, Ling has participated in some achingly dull photo 'research' recently.
Photo Research
One weekend was spent doing endless loops for me in the car at varying speeds while I tested various shutter speed settings to measure blurring. (Conclusion: blur car + sharp background = boring)
Last weekend I spent learning the different focus controls for my birthday present EOS-1v camera body. Simultaneously I was figuring out how to pan a car moving at highway speeds with a 400mm lens. (Conclusion: approximately 1/250 is a good shutter speed -- decent blurring of the background while keeping the car body sharp and a little bit of motion conveyed by the wheels. Depending on how fast the car is going, and the degree of 'abstracted' background you want, it seems like you are safe in the range 1/125 and 1/500. For my tastes 1/500 was a bit too much total freeze for me)
The third project I worked on was to figure out the pareto variables for taking sharp photos. Several things learned:
These all were interesting projects to work on, actually. I did them all as rough prototype experiments. If I ever was bored enough I would like to redo them completely and add some quantitative analysis to the interpretation.