ALIKATNZ.COM

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.

Equipment:

1x D200
2x 4gb CF Cards
3x EN-EL3e Batteries
1x MB-D200 Battery grip
1x Slik Tripod
1x Tokina 12-24 f4 Lens

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

Another camera club night has been and gone and again, I did very well! I walked away with First Place (with Honours as only honours images are eligible for podium) overall in the intermediate grade! YAY!

Here is the winning entry:

A stunning image right? I actually went to the effort of getting this printed and framed and gave it to my Mum for Mothers Day. So she has the winner hanging on her office wall right now.

When I say to people I walked around the corner in Plaza di Panama, Balboa Park, San Diego, saw this and went wow, they say it sounds so cliché but the truth is the whole architecture of the Plaza was wow. We don’t have anything like this in New Zealand. The place is visually stunning and this photo is just one walkway of many, a stolen moment from the afternoon we were there.

Late last night while researching some photoshop techniques, I came across LPSNZ honours and in my usual easily distracted fashion, I decided to look into what is required. Its tough. A set of 10 images equally as strong as the other. I could do this. I could make this a goal to get LPSNZ honours next year if I really put some effort in and find the right mentor to help me.

This got me thinking and a few friends are giving me the shove in the correct direction, that I should start kicking things up a gear, and for me, a view to honours. They’re keen to commission me for a series of photographs of landscapes and architectural photographs as well.

So there it is, a goal – LPSNZ honours. Try until I get them. And finally, some photography work that might actually pay (even if it is only peanuts and wine)

So my friend Akia from gadgets.geek.nz and I decided late one night we would both do a photo a day posts on our respective blogs. We’re going to keep going until we decide to stop! (just in case you wondered why you were getting just photos in your RSS feed!)