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

After my original post where I told you all what was in my handbag, I had an inkling that I was carrying around too much stuff. It wasn’t until last night when I strolled from the Pukekohe Arts Centre to the Pizza Box for a coffee and back again that I realised my shoulder was hurting from carrying all of this stuff around.

So without futher a-do, I present a pictorial blog post of

The Handbag : Unloaded And On My Desk

And now, click on one of the images below for the close up:

On Wednesday night, I attended the Vodafone Get Smart event at their HQ in Auckland. Traffic was a nightmare, but I got there on time. I have a thing about being late. I commence anxiety attacks if running just slightly late. I was offered a free car park by Hamish Sansom via Twitter. According to his twitter profile he’s the head honcho for mobile data at Vodafone. Nice. I found my way through the carpark, to the elevator and then to reception. They had name tags, but I didn’t. But of note, they had a name tag there for someone who I knew was attending the event in Christchurch. I could have stolen it and pretended to be Andy Ghozali for the evening. But I’m the wrong gender for that. Never to mind. They made me a label. Read more »

This is an email I sent last night to Telecom about their (lack of) service due to a recent fault caused by them at the exchange:

Yesterday when I got home from work, I found my Internet not working. The last time I had seen my PC online from logmein.com was earlier that morning. I rang your 0800GETXTRA number at 5.30pm and selected the appropriate selections to get your help desk. After eliminating my modem & computers as the cause of the outage, it was determined that there was a technical fault at your end. I was informed that they would call me back, which may have happened. But I had to call back at 7pm to find out if it was indeed a technical fault. I was patched through to Peter (not his real name) in Auckland, who was excellent and very helpful. He explained that I was most likely mis-jumpered at the exchange. This had happened to me before back in February. But he would get a technician to look into it. But this could take until Thursday afternoon but they would be in touch. Read more »