Shanghai Tan

Last Sunday I went to see the A1GP race at Shanghai International Circuit with a colleague. This is the same circuit that the Formula 1 uses. I never shoot car racing photo before, so I thought maybe it’d be fun to try. I brought my Canon 5D and 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens along with the Benro monopod that was bought the day earlier. Together it wasn’t very heavy, but it wasn’t light at all, considering that I have also brought the 24-70mm f/2.8L and a 2x extender in the same bag but not used finally.

The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show
The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show
The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show	The Ferrari show

Two things surprised me very much! The first is I never heard so noisy cars before. I was standing about 50m from the car’s passage, maybe 30m higher, but everytime it passes close, I can’t help but felt scare. I know nothing isn’t gonna happen, but it took about 20 rounds before I get used to the noise.

The leg show	The leg show	The leg show
The dragon dance	The dragon dance	The dragon dance

The second surprising thing is how far the car passed my viewfinder! The moment I see the car in the viewfinder, I have to press the second-half of the button (already focused) very fast before it leave the viewfinder. Most of the time I have to pan with the car in order to take multiple shots of it. To properly stop the car, I had to use a shutter speed of 1/4000s. At the weather condition of that moment, I had to push ISO to 1600 at f/3.2 aperture. Therefore the photo didn’t come out very nice. But with panning technics, I could leave ISO at 400, f/6.3 and shutter speed of 1/400s. Beside better image quality, the background is also motion-blurred, which gives the perception of a very fast moving car!

The race begins!	The race begins!	The race begins!
The China Team	The China Team	The China Team

The only thing I regret was not being able to go to another standing block to shoot the race cars in the face and in the curve. Now that I know how this works, I wish I could go to F1 at October and get down to the track to shoot the cars and chicks closer.

The Canada Team	The Lebannon Team	The India Team
The British and Germany Teams	The Ireland Team	The Australia Team

Click here to see the whole album.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 2:15 am and is filed under Shanghai Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.