Tonfanau Road Race

[Darren Turner]

4 times a a year there is a road race meeting of up to 200 bikes held at an old WW2 army camp at Tonfanau near Tywyn just 10 mins away from me.

All that is left of the army camp is a nice road for the bikes to race on, plenty of oped fields & a few dilapidated old barn / buildings.

the images i took don't actually vary to much due to my location i chose with sun to my rear / right. So they all to similar an not much interest apart from some nice looking bikes flying past at about 100pmh. A great opportunity for me to practice some panning. with both mt 70-200mm F2.8 L & 100-400mm L

Non of these images have been cropped.

Thanks for looking

Daz

 

[Pete Askew]

Not cropped? Yet, you mean!

My favourite is the one of the 2 people waiting to start. What would that be like in B&W?

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Nice set Darren - I can see the panning technique was being given a good workout

As you get into it, try dropping the shutter speed even further - you've got the timing/framing right, it's more a case of matching the bike speed accurately and getting a really blurred background.

Also worth a note - take a look at shot #1 and shot #2 - you can see how the camera has seen the black outfit in the first shot, and opened up the exposure, and seen the white outfit in the second, and under exposed.

This is a real challenge as bikes, and race cars, are often a mix of hard colours, including black and white, and it messes with the camera something rotten!

Best thing to do is to go manual on exposure, set it for the ambient lighting, and shoot away - that way the cars/bikes won't effect the final shot - you can do the same with WB as well, taking it off Auto, and selecting Daylight for example, so that a red car won't fool the AWB into making the shot go blue.

 

[Paul Lange]

Some of those are super sharp, I guess the fast lens helps but you obviously have got the hang of it.

When you say set exposure for ambient lighting do you mean use a grey card or the sunny 16 rule or do you meter something an dthen adjust so its the required tone Chris?

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Any of the above really Paul - if you have a Kodak grey card you can set exposure and WB in one shot - if not, then pointing the camera at greenery like grass or trees gets you a very good exposure reading.

If you have a light meter that does incident readings, even better.

You can also check the histogram on the camera and adjust from there - the idea is to dial in something that's set, and not going to be influenced by overly bright or dark vehicles coming into frame - or headlights for that matter if you're head-on.

 

[Alastair Cummins]

As said on Flickr Daz they are a great set of pics and youve picked up this motorsport lark very quickly

I will have to look into setting a manual exposure on my D40 as I did struggle on the evening stages in Ypres when the cars started to use their stupidly bright lights, making the pics very dark!