We went to the local track on the Bank holiday to lose a modest amount of money and, for me, to take a few photos. Well – about 550. First the excuses, as none of the resulting shots would make the grade for stock. It was a little overcast, so the high speed shots I took were all in the ISO 400 to 500 territory. I’d also hoped to take a few snaps somewhere near to one of the jumps, but we were confined to the single enclosure which probably spanned a couple of hundred metres of the flat part of the track.

Some passable results. First up, some high speed shots. Everything was taken on shutter priority [including the motion blur pictures below]. I don’t think there’s any point in messing around with shooting in RAW when you are going to be firing off a lot of pictures, and then not really make any significant adjustments in post.

1/1000 sec at 250mm, ISO 500 at F5

1/1000 sec at 100mm, ISO 500 at F4.5

A couple of motion blur shots:

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 100 at F9

The choice of 1/80 second was an educated guess based on having a couple of attempts at taking shots of cars over the last few years. Not great luck with composition in both of these, but it’s always going to be a lottery with so many subjects in play.

1/80 sec at 105mm, ISO 200 at F10

Bit of a nudge on the saturation and curves [auto contrast]. Finally, and primarily to reinforce the investment in the tablet [!], the obligatory colour popping shot:

1/1000 sec at 160mm, ISO 500 at F10

Some pictures from Leicester’s home game on Saturday, my first proper outing with my new 7D. These were taken with shutter priority [1/640 second], and various ISO settings, but generally 400.

I went up to Leicester to watch the Tigers’ first home game of the season at the weekend. It was an enjoyable game but not as replete with photographic opportunities as my last home game earlier in the year. This was down to a pretty solid defensive performance by both sides, so there were no tries run in. Also, the late kickoff meant that I hit the limits of what my camera could do by the time the second half kicked off, when the light started to fade.

This picture of Geordan Murphy is probably the best of my results on the day:

1/500 sec at f5.6, ISO 400 at 400mm

I quite like this:

1/1000 sec at f5.6, ISO 400 at 400mm

The scrum half [Hall Charlton?], as the main subject, isn’t tack sharp, showing one of the disadvantages of using only the centre focus point, but it’s still quite a reasonable capture of the action.

By the time the floodlights came on, about the most I could squeeze out of my camera at 400mm was 1/160 second at ISO 1600 – nowhere near fast enough.