Modernpics – The Blog

Summer Nationals

The third round of the 2009 MSA Drag Racing series came from Santa Pod raceway.

Andy Robinson had yet another domineering weekend in Pro Mod, taking his second round win of the championship. Andy put in a strong performance running clearly ahead of the pack with regular 6.01 second passes all weekend. A pace that the pack couldn’t match giving Andy a much deserved round win. The final saw him line up along side an ever improving Graham Ellis.

Graham matched Andy to half track however car started to move around under Graham forcing him to lift. That handed the win to Andy with a 6.1561/230.08 to a loosing 6.7528/217.10

Super Modified saw rookie Belinda Bull make massive improvements all weekend and went into the final as the underdog to seasoned championship winner Nigel Payne.  Both cars got away well and ran side by side all the way Belinda took the win with a 0.0676 of a second margin. It cant get much closer than that!

Picture wise I was on a fairly free deadline and wasn’t under much pressure to produce anything to brief, its always nice as a photographer to be basically told to go have fun and produce something worth looking at. Its weekends like this that I try to move away from the norm and play.

Right time for some pic’s
I’d been wanting to get down the bottom end of the track at santa pod for a while, unfortunately due to the schedule at the Main Event it wasn’t feasible from a track point of view however I took the opportunity this weekend to take a trip down there and see what was do able and what wasn’t, I didn’t spent long there as most of the classes didn’t need to pull the chutes.

A worth while exploration as I know what I need to be doing for next time.

Back down at the sharp end of the track. I was digging the great clouds that were floating around, Light, bright and very fluffy,

Always find bikes a little difficult to shoot as they are tiny and dont really fill the frame unless you shoot tight, which is something Im not always a fan off.

However I think this really works

Late saterday afternoon the sun started reflecting off a chunk of cloud. It was making a really strange softbox style of light on the track. A quick fiddle of some dials and an aggressive exposure set up meant  I was able to get something a little diffrent.

As racing pressed on and the sun started to drop down behind the spectator bank. I couldnt resist going agaisnt the grain and spend some time shooting into the sun , while heavily under exposing the foreground but using the tinniest hint of flash to throw some detail back into the subjects.

I printed the above off on 20×30 fine art paper (hit the buy link above to get your own copy). The detail and texture of the photo is simply stunning..
As Steve Woollatt was pushed back to the line after the burn out I saw an opportunity to really do something off the wall. Stopping the aperture down to f22 gave me the star burst on the sun that mixed in with -1 stop exposure adjustment (yes I mainly shoot in AV and TV, problem?). This exposed the horizon clouds properly, under exposed the foreground and the nd grads took care of fading the sky to a deep blue. Shame about being able to see all the dirt on my sensor/lens/filters but its part for the course when photographing drag racing, nothing photoshop wont fix .

A slightly softer effect but with Wayne Nicholson

Sunday had some of the most unusual clouds I have ever seen. I have no idea what’s going on but the clouds have a 3D feel to them that just drags you kicking and screaming into the picture.

Towards the end of the day I started playing around in the area between the two lanes. A space that allows me to get closer and lower to the cars than the outside of the track does.

Thats all for this week folks more in a fortnight from the NSRA Nostalgia Nationals.

Hey guys hope you enjoyed reading that, more to follow shortly dont forget that you can join me on the modernpics facebook page. If you want to look at more really cool pics check out europes best drag racing image library

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 12:39 am and is filed under Drag Racing and tagged with Dominic Romney, dragracing, MSA, photography, Pro Mod, Santa Pod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.