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Car #228 Chris Coulthard

'Holeshot' buggy #228 driven by Alice Spring's Chris Coulthard (above) and co-pilot Matt Wharton ran the fastest Class Two buggy ( 1300-1650cc) during the 2004 Finke Desert Race. Theirs was the seventh fastest car overal with a total time 4:49:39 (2:25:54 day 1 / 2:23:45 day 2).

Back from Finke 2004

Johnson/Walker (Car #122) from Ingle Farm SA blast through the race's final turn in their Buggy. How did that front wheel stay on?

Just returned from Alice Springs and 2004 Finke Desert Race... More articles and photos to follow. (and as always, you can look at the Finke Desert Race Category )

#860 Wayne Onions

Wayne Onions (Boyne Island, Queensland) blasts through the Prologue of the 2003 Finke Desert Race. He pushed his KTM 525 EXC to first place in the Class 8 bikes (Veterans) and placed 86th quickest bike overall with a time of 5:50:59

Others' Finke Websites

In addition to some nice photos of the 2003 Finke Race, Steve Clark caught a great bike crash on video. It occurred roughly 20km along the track.

Dangerously close to disaster

This montage (click it for a bigger image) was hair-raising for both the riders and the photographer.

Picture this. It's 730am on Prologue Day at the Finke. The temperature, which the MC keeps gloating about, is hovering a few degrees above 0C. I'm holding an expensive metal tube full of glass with bare hands and feeling the pain of it.

I'm dutifully taking shots in the morning's warm, low-angle sun. The race is starting out with the bizarre 'Outfits' class -- dirtbikes with sidecars. The sidecar drivers are not passive riders. They're hanging their ass out all over the bike to help it corner faster.

As the third crew to pass around the turn I'm watching comes roaring by, something catches! I think the driver caught the heavy dirt shoulder of the turn. In a flash I'm watching the bike roll over and the riders tumble through the air!

It was sort of like being in a car wreck myself. Everything was momentarily slow-motion. I remember realizing, "yeah, I'm aimed right on this wreck with a gigantic lens, and a monster camera with a power boost-drive." Then I remember considering for another agonizing moment, "is it rude to be photographing these guys flying through the air?". And then finally deciding, "Hell no! They'll enjoy the photographs better than anyone." and then snapping away.

I felt like an absolute hero for about five minutes. The guys (#1025 Steve Harvey and Mark Green from Taperoo) had righted their bike, restarted it, and finished the prologue. I'm grinning ear-to-ear for having caught this on film.

Then I re-inspect my film settings and realize, "holy fucking shit. holy fucking shit.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I suck.
I hate myself.
I really hate myself.

My clumsy, numb fingers had accidentally whacked the exposure setting down more than one stop. The photos were junk!

I cannot convey how disgusted with myself I was. I even digressed to hoping another outfit wiped out at the exact same spot for me to capture. This time I promised myself to have the exposure dialed in right, and hold down the shutter trigger as if it were a Vulcan chain gun.

Alas, and of course, it didn't happen. I consoled myself that maybe I could use Photoshop to torture a decent picture out of the data. And in fact, the rough draft you see above is reasonably salvaged. I probably can do a better job with more effort, but it's good enough for now.

At any rate, it was a good lesson for me, and I assiduously checked the exposure wheel from then on. As well, I tried to track the vehicles with my lens whether I was shooting or not. There's never enough time to catch a crash in midair otherwise.

A Diet of Dust

Three hundred cars and bikes blasting through the desert generates an insane amount of dust. Nearly more than you can fathom. Choosing spots along the track from which to photograph had to take three things into consideration:

Safety
I saw scores of instances where cars were flying wide outside of turns, way inside of turns, and just off the course randomly. I gave myself a rule that I'd always keep an eye on the car, whether I was shooting it there or not. I had no interest in being run-down, even if I would get to watch the rest of the race from a helicopter.

Sun
The warm Outback sun was great, especially in the morning and late afternoon, so I was always aiming for to be between it and the driverss.

Dust
The dust clouds drift away like giant dirt zeppelins as the cars pass. As much as possible you try to find a location where the prevailing winds pushes the dirt cloud away from you, rather than over and through you. It seemed almost futile at times trying to keep my lens dust-free. I was constantly squirting it with a blower-bulb.

Vigorously Attacked the Jumps

Damien Brunello, from Mt. Isa, caught my attention 200m before this jump. I heard him coming, and watched as he never relented from the throttle as he took each of the jumps in series. No suprise that Damien came in 13th in his class.

Aristihtis Polychronopoulos Lands Firm

Bike 596, a Honda CRF 450, lays in another landing after a series of short jumps along the prologue circuit. Polychronopoulos finished 15th in his class of 36 finishers, and fifty entrants.

Ricky Chambers finishing up Day 1

Ricky Chambers (#969), from Alice Springs, crossing the wide, dry, and exceptionally sandy bed of the Finke River as he wraps up the first day's leg.

The Quad Racers (Class 9) seemed a determined crew, with only two of twenty-two entries failing to finish. Ricky finished 13th in his class, roughly an hour behind the fastest class 9, and two hours, forty minutes, behind the King of the Desert, Max Burrows and his monster vehicle.

It says volumes about determined drivers like these who suffer nearly twice as long as anyone else. And if that doesn't convince you of their good attitudes, I'll mention that Ricky was the only driver, of the hundreds I photographed, who actually waved as he went by.

Colin Johnson

Driver Colin Johnson and Co-pilot Leanne Walker slam their 3.5l Class 1 buggy around the Finke Prologue circuit. The Prologue race is a short (10-15km) circuit each driver faces the day before the race. Results from the prologue set the take-off order for the race itself. The farther back you start, the more choking dust you're forced to eat on the grueling 400km circuit. They ended up finishing as the 34th fastest car.

Back from the Finke!

I got back Wednesday. Everything went well and was fun. I am furiously scanning in all my photos (about 550) and will get them into some presentations asap. Lots to write about, too.

Weather Guaranteed

Zero concerns about the weather during our trip to the Finke Desert Race... Every day perfectly clear, high 75F, low 48F. The only pity is that since it is winter, the day is short, so only 11.5 hours of visible light per day. These excellent conditions, plus a first-quarter moon, means that on this trip I will get to see the Southern Sky constellations. On my prior, month-long, trip to Australia (Sydney-Blue Mountains-Arapiles-Melbourne, June 1998) it was perpetually overcast and I saw nothing.

Map Prep

Spent a chunk of this afternoon packing up gear for the Finke trip on Wednesday. This evening I worked on the navigation.

Mapsource
I reluctantly re-installed Mapsource so that I could download Garmin's meagre basemap of Australia into my GPS. Six map quadrants covered an enormous swath of Australia--very nearly from Darwin on the north coast to the southern coast. I expect I could put the entire Australian map into my GPS if I wanted to.

I upgraded the Mapsource software from 3.20 to 4.something. The errata doesn't show any special new functionality just endless kludge-sounding fixes where in certain peculiar circumstances Mapsource does peculiar things. ("2. Fixed an issue where the Tide Prediction calendar control was not working correctly in some date ranges when Windows was set to a time zone that automatically adjusted for daylight savings time." and "5. Fixed an issue where MapSource would not correctly send the Dark Green track color to some units." )Big Suprise. I don't really know why these hacks merited a left-of-decimal-point increase.

At least now I have basic Australian navigation capability, so long as the Etrex Vista doesn't vomit on me during the trip.

OziExplorer and Epson 2100
I'm not bringing any laptop this trip, so I'll have to rely solely on GPS and paper maps. The amusing thing was to take some of my higher-fidelity maps of Australia, load them into OziExplorer, dump the map.BMPs to Photoshop, and convert that into a one-page map cropped and accented to my exact specifications.

The final result was compressing the better part of three large maps into an A3 format page (11.7"x16.5") printed with photo quality. Fortunately my printer has excellent resolution. The map detail is just large enough to be legible with an unaided eye. It's nice to have the complete course on one map.

This prototype should help me to figure out what makes a good custom map design for our August trip.

Finke Desert Preparations

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:

Exciting Desert Race

Last year I became quite smitten with the video and photo footage of the Paris-Dakar Rally. The ultimate would be to participate in the race, but as I thought about it, it would be a great adventure to even spend three weeks following it through North Africa as a photographer.

I've never photographed something like that, so I could do with some practice first. So I started looking around for some smaller-scale and more accessible events where I could gain some experience. I initially found that Perth was holding a stage in the World Rally Championships. That sounds pretty excellent. But as I came to find, they're quite difficult about giving press/photo access to the event. As I was losing enthusiasm for this event, I started looking for more 'country' events -- more carefree organization, friendlier, with good access to wild desert race action.

Although I was aware of the Finke Desert Race earlier, I had never really considered to go there. After all, it's held in Alice Springs Australia in June. I'll be going to Alice Springs in August already. Why go twice?

Upon deeper reflection, it became the shockingly obvious answer: