The 4th Annual Open Sports Nationals

Its been a while, I’ve been busy loads of things to share with you good people when I get the chance but for the mean time here is what I got up to at the open sports nationals from a very hot Shakespeare county raceway

The weekend saw several hundred speed hungry racers descend on the sleepy village of Long Marston for the 4th annual Open Sports Nationals, hot weather insured lots of very close racing.

Weather conditions were hot and sunny however the cloud cover was giving some very flat and uninspired light, had to brake out the really soft ND grads and had to ride the exposure really hard to be able to put and contrast and pop back into the photos.

I’m always concious about not getting repetitive with only having two national tracks in the uk its all too easy to get stuck in a rut and shoot every thing the same, which is going to get dull and boring to look at.

300mm and a little bit of a crop let me get this tidy image of a biker against the checkered wall. clean and simple, could do with some tire smoke but I think it still works well.

shooting into the sun is always great with burn out smoke and a darker colour car .

Same shot but the sun is at a completely different angle to the car and see how it completely changes the shot.

Empty stands really don’t help the shot but there is not much I can do about that

late friday the sun dropped out the sky leaving the light coming from the back right of the car, limits you to pretty much shooting from behind or side on, nocked the exposure down a stop or two and as able to get bob glassup side lit in an attempt to be “arty”

Always on the look out for something a little odd or different to tell a story, Here Dave Crunkhorn has a nap in the fire up lanes while waiting for a oil down to be cleared up.

Bit of a panaramic shot as Jason Rew spins the tires on his Out law flat four car.

Im a burn out photo fanatic if I’m honest however the start lines are often not the clearest of places to shoot and I just love the way the tire smoke blends the background into the sky

Shot on the 70-200 something I rarely use in drag racing as its just such a common lens and angle. However I was looking for something a little diffrent so I pulled it out to see what I could do. Like this shot, for such a long focal lenght the car really over powers the frame. If your wondering yes that is full frame with no crop

70mm again and tiny bit of fill flash to give the image some definition think the dropped cylinder really adds to the image.

Back on with the 16-35 and I really started to slow the shutter speed down to get some movement into the shots

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am. It is filed under Drag Racing and tagged with Avon Park, Dominic Romney, dragracing, MSA, Open Sports Nationals, Shakespeare Country Raceway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.