San Jose Grand Prix

I'll be there with some friends on race day (Sun 7/31). Oh and I'm just getting the general admission tix and will be out an about on near the track.

Anyone else going?

I scored general admission tickets for Fri-Sun. Cheers to showing up to work on monday sunburnt as heck!

-hutch

You guy probali don't know me, But ya I will be there. I would suggest a meet up, but then there is no chance for us to get our X any where near downtown..... I guess I will see you guy on the Light rail.

All I can say is Awesome!!!!!!! Probably a few things they need to work on for next year, the pedestrian bridges to name one biggie. I'm about to walk back down there for the Champ car final race. Varrooooooom.

I had a few friend up in San Jose and being a huge champ car fan I had to go (plus I had free tickets). What a blast, I didnt think about checking this fourm, bummer, it would have been great to meet some of ya. We'll try it again next year. (Hopefully with more bridges)

Cheers,
Larry
SCCX

That's the only good shot I took, cars were moving too fast!

- Matt

Cool pic. ...Only good shot...out of how many?

Very nice Matt! Of all the racers you captured the race winner perfectly.

I still need to go through mine to see how I did, but I think my camera kept focusing on the fence.

Thanks. I took 50+ pictures of the cars. The problem is that since the cars are moving so fast, that even at ISO 200 with a 1/500s shutter speed you cannot stop their motion enough to get a good non-blurred shot. What you have to do instead is to track the car with the camera and use a slower shutter speed (1/100 - 1/80) which has the effect of keeping the car sharp and bluring the background. This is further complicated by the fact that I didn't want to shoot through two fences so I was trying to track the cars while keeping the correct speed of camera movement and keeping them in frame all while holding the camera over my head and not being able to see through the viewfinder.

Oh, and as Huy pointed out the camera has a tendency to focus on the fence, and also the autofocus delay means you may miss the shot so all pictures had to be manually pre-focused.

- Matt

You must have been one of the folks I saw hanging from the trees on Almaden. Great pic! My camera doesn't take very good action photos.

Nice pic Matt. The fence makes nice effects. My coworker went and took some pics with his P&S and on most of them it looked like he took pictures of the empty street. Since the cars were moving too fast and with delay shutter, he missed it completely.

Matt - what camera did you use?

KJ_dragon,

I shot that with a Canon EOS Digital rebel with the stock 18-55mm zoom. Here's the EXIF information, I used a slower shutter speed and tracked the car to get the blurred background effect.

Shooting Mode
Manual
Tv( Shutter Speed )
1/80
Av( Aperture Value )
18
Metering Mode
Center-weighted averaging
ISO Speed
100
Lens
18.0 - 55.0 mm
Focal Length
27.0 mm
Image Size
3072x2048
Image Quality
Fine
Flash
Off
White Balance
Auto
AF Mode
Manual Focus
Parameters
Contrast +1
Sharpness +1
Color saturation +1
Color tone Normal
Color Space
sRGB
File Size
2566KB
Drive Mode
Single-frame shooting