I have been upto my eyeballs in lightroom and photoshop putting together some photos for an upcoming exhibition in a weeknight. Eeekkkk! Anyway, my dear friend, Ant, who is the most talented photog I know put me onto some good software plugins and so tonight, when I was meant to be working on exhibition entries, I grunged up this pipe shot from a year or so ago. Enjoy.
It’s had a wee HDR treatment and then textured up in photoshop. I quite like the looks of this. Way longer than I would spend on one photo, but it made an average shot pretty cool. There’s an after and before as well.
If you came to me in January last year and told me that I would spend 12 months working my ass off as a volunteer for motorsport and that I would grow my talent (I don’t know if I would call it a talent, or just a good eye for details?) as a photographer – I would have asked you what drugs you were on and if they were legal, and would you share.
I believe I’ve found my stride in life. While my lot is always a happy one – a job where I get crap daily – I have thrown myself personally into my private endeavours. Originally my plan was to go back to tech to get a qualification to earn more money at work etc, but I always wanted that perfect work-life balance.
A change in roles in Motorsport saw me step up from being a timid player behind the scenes, scared to speak out because I felt like I was always getting myself in the crap, to the realisation that it was more that other people were holding me back because of their insecurities, or that they felt threatened by what I could achieve. I no longer see myself as a grunt on the ground so to speak, but like the proverbial phoenix, I’ve risen as a leader from the ashes of my discontent with the sport. That sounds really crap, but its true. I was at a point where I was already to walk away from all the time and energy, and I feel totally different.
Never thought I would consider myself a leader!
And then, I never thought I’d consider myself a winner either. I don’t think I have a talent for photography, I just think I look at things differently and the way of communicating that is through the camera. I think allowing myself more time behind the camera has improved my technique and I can’t wait to see what the next few months bring. I’ve already got people asking for prints of my work and it is still taking some time to sink in that other people like what I’m doing.
For once, I’m excited about where these things will lead me. I’m already getting a new and improved reputation in motorsport and making a name for myself, albeit a small name for myself, in photography, so I say: Life – BRING IT!
Yesterday was the six hour race at Pukekohe Park Raceway and as I mentioned a few days ago, I had a brainwave to do a time lapse of the front straight of the track. I’ve done one time lapse before, but this was the first time I’d attempted something on this scale.
I set my camera up on the top level of the members grandstand. It had a view of the start/finish line, a bit of the grandstand and the area behind “Jennian Homes” as well as across to Buckland and the skies above the track. This time, I had the power of 3x spare batteries up my sleeve. Or so I thought. Turns out I grabbed 2x Spares and a spare for another nikon camera that has *very* similar looking batteries. Le Sigh. But I didn’t know this when I set up my tripod.
Basing my calculations on a 4gb memory card and two batteries every 3 hours, I should have been home and hosed, but given my f**k up with the spare battery, I had to change my plan and it worked in my favour I think.
I used my auto focus to focus a point on the track just in front of the flag point at pit exit and then engaged the clutch on the lens to manual and adjusted the focus. The images are very slightly out of focus, but there isn’t much I can do about that now, and you wouldn’t know looking at the video either.
Set to ISO 200 and aperture to f11 and the camera in Aperture Priority mode, I left the camera to make the best decision about shutter speed. While this does deplete my battery even faster, it allows for long shutter speeds as the light fades. And the lower the ISO, the longer the shutter speed. That whole triangle of exposure thingymajig. We kicked off with a shutter speed of 1/200.
Using the built in interval timer in my camera, one exposure every 15 seconds. As the light failed, and so did my batteries, I darted out onto the balcony and changed it down to one every minute and by then the shutter speed was adjusting itself to 1.5″ every minute. Awesome.
Over two compact flash cards, I came home with 1597 photos. It took a while to import them all into Lightroom. From there, I adjusted the exposure for the sky to bring the clouds out more and cropped them to 16:9 widescreen for HD video format. I took the finished product and exported them to ProShow, where I dropped the image count down to a more respectable 1326 frames and display them for 0.125 seconds, and so, the whole positioning period, safety car, rolling start, race, safety cars etc and to parc ferme are all captured.
Of course I’m really impressed with the results. Dropping down the shutter at the end of the day means a lot less boring stuff at the end, but meant I was able to capture the whole race. Funny how these things work themselves out.
So without further ado, I present 300x Laps, 1326 frames, 6 hours all squeezed into 2:47
I got the idea today for my next kick ass time lapse photography project. You may remember, I did one a while ago of the signwriting of a hardside trailer body that we had here at work. I’ve been trying to find something not signwriting related that I can have a crack at and then today, I had that eureka moment!
Tomorrow is the Six Hour Endurance race at Pukekohe. It starts at 2pm in the afternoon and runs until 8pm at night. That is two hours in darkness. When I’m at the race track, I work from the Race Control booth at the top of the members stand. It gives me a view of pretty much the entire race track bar part of the front straight because someone rudely stuck a bridge there and through the dip.
So tomorrow, while working in race control, I will set up my camera, Nikon D200, on a tripod with my super-wide lens (Tokina 12-24 f/4) that I acquired while in the states earlier this year and fire off an exposure every 15-20 seconds. I will need to make a few adjustments etc as the shoot continues, but I expect these to be minor adjustments to simple things like ISO as it gets darker.
So my goal is tomorrow afternoon set up the camera during the lunch break on a tripod on the top level of the members grandstand, set the aperture to f11 or similar, take a shutter speed reading, switch to manual everything and just check my settings every hour or so throughout the evening until the end.
With the 1200-1440 exposures expected, I won’t be shooting in RAW, but JPG, probably medium quality as well. That way I can get 1200 exposures to one 4GB compact flash card. I will be using the battery grip as I can swap batteries out throughout the evening just in case because that was my achilles heel last time I did one of these babies.
Suffice to say, this time around, I’m better equipped/prepared and I think I know what I’m going.
While the time lapse is clicking away, I’m going to spend about 30 minutes taking a handful of long exposure shots on another camera and some bracketed shots at dusk to use for HDR as I’ve never really tried my hand at that either.
But in the words of a mentor, if HDR is turning up at camera club level, its already overused.
Of course, I will share the finished work right here and on twitter/facebook/youtube etc
posterous 
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