I love music, photography, and automobile racing. And the three are a perfect mix when you think about it. A well-tuned engine at full song is music to any racing enthusiast’s ear and racecars are also great subjects for photography. Most of them are colorful, artistically-decorated-rolling-billboards for the team’s sponsors, and the bodies of these cars can be classified as moving pieces of sculpture – albeit moving at a very high rate of fuel consumption.
Saturday Roxanne and I attended the 58th running of The 12 Hours of Sebring. If you’re not familiar with this kind of racing, it’s an endurance race. The car that covers the most distance in 12 hours and survives to pass the checkered flag wins the race. It’s a test of endurance for the cars, drivers, pit crews, and the fans as well.
We arrived at the track at around 7:30 in the morning, after spending the night with my cousin who lives a few miles away. We took just enough gear to photograph the race. In the past I’d wake up at 4:00 AM and drive for 2½ hours to beat the crowd to the entry gate. Ah… it’s wonderful to arrive refreshed and relaxed.
Our first stop was the pits, where we watched the cars being prepared to do battle. We grabbed a few pictures, watched the preliminary warm up and then we went to the grid to watch the final preparations. We grabbed some shots of the colorful helmets and watched the flurry of activity as the drivers got “in the zone” for their first stint in the cars. Before they cleared the grid, we retreated to a spectator mound to watch the start of the race.
Getting Ready
The race started on time —it had to, it was being televised— and we watched as the cars roared by at well over 100 MPH. To photograph a car traveling that fast, you pan your camera and track the car in the viewfinder, which keeps the motion of the camera at the same relative speed as the car. When you pan perfectly, the background, slower cars, rotating wheels and tires are a blur, yet you can see every detail on the car, even the driver’s names.
We moved from corner to corner for a few hours, and then decided to stop for lunch. With all the exercise we had walking around the track, we figured we could stand a little cholesterol so we opted for burgers and fries, the lunch of champions –not. And besides the concession where we purchased our feast, although way overpriced, offered an air-conditioned dining room with un-splintered wooden benches. As I sat down to eat my face felt like it was on fire because I’d forgotten to bring the sunscreen. Roxanne said it was glowing a stunning shade of crimson.
After lunch we decided to get artistic with our Lensbaby Composers. We went to the Gallery of Legends where several old racing cars were on display. My jaw almost dropped to the floor when I saw the only Jaguar XJ13 ever built, a beautiful automobile that was originally constructed in 1966 to contest The 24 Hours of LeMans. The car is valued at a mind-boggling 20 million dollars: suitable fodder for the Lensbaby. The representative from Jaguar asked about my lens. When I told him about it, he said, “Maybe you should have left the Lensbaby at home and remembered the sunscreen. I feel your heat.” Well, being slightly absent minded is sometimes the price you pay for your art.
A few hours later we had several hundred photographs on our memory cards and empty stomachs. Next year we’ll be more prepared and pack our own food, but this year we had to rely on trackside concession stands, which are several steps removed from the Golden Arches Supper Club. We stopped at a brightly colored stand and ordered hot dogs, fries, and lemonade. Even though it was iced, the lemonade was lukewarm. The hot dogs looked like they’d been cooked on the exhaust manifold of a pickup truck, and the fries looked like they’d been cooked in recycled transmission fluid. But it was food.
After washing down the trackside gourmet dinner with copious amounts of spring water, we went to the hairpin curve to watch the sunset. When the drivers approach the hairpin at sunset, they’re driving directly into the sun at approximately 160 mph and have to slow down to about 30 mph, which means a heavy application of brakes. The brakes dissipate so much heat, they glow red-hot.
Racing into the sunset!
After the sun sinks below the horizon, there’s not much you can do to take pictures unless you have a powerful flash. Flashing drivers has never been high on my list, so I decided to try the artsy-fartsy approach instead. I set the camera mode dial to B, which keeps the shutter open as long as you hold your finger on the shutter button. The resulting image is known as a time exposure. Typically you shoot a time exposure with your camera on a tripod to get a blur-free image. Instead, I just held the shutter button and panned with the car to get an artistic blur of lights with a hint of the shape of the racecar.
The race was a lot of fun, but we left before the end to avoid the mad rush of 90,000 race fans –some of them significantly inebriated– impatiently waiting to get through one gate. When we got home, we watched the post race festivities on television. The Peugeot team won the race. Today Roxanne and I are in recovery mode – please pass the Aloe.
“New Light Through Old Windows” is an album by Chris Rea. You may not know who Chris Rea is, or remember the album, but “New Light Through Old Windows” should be a mantra for any photographer who wants to improve his or her craft. if you photograph the same areas, people or objects over and over again using the same techniques, you get the same results. To improve your photography you either need to photograph different people, places, or things, and photograph them in a way that you’ve not photographed them before. This could mean exploring a new place, photographing a person you’ve never photographed before or using a different lens or different camera settings to achieve a different look.
Another way you can let new light in through old windows is by using different techniques in Aperture, Lightroom or Photoshop. Experiment with different filters. or different ways of processing RAW images. Play with the color temperature settings, change the Vibrance, Clarity, and/or Saturation settings. Want a dreamy look for your portrait? Drag the Clarity Slider to -100. What, you say you don’t want the dreamy look on the whole image? Use the Adjustment Brush to paint Clarity settings onto specific parts of the image. These are a couple of suggestions. The possible combinations for achieving different effects are limited only by your imagination. If you have an application like Lightroom that has presets you can modify, tweak the settings to achieve different results. When you see something you like, save it as a new preset. In Photoshop you have Adjustment Layers, which is a wonderful tool for getting a different look to your images. If you’re stuck for new things to try, you can find tons of techniques by entering the name of your software and the key phrase “special effects” in your favorite search engine.
Recently Roxanne and I let some new light in through old windows. We were exploring a nature museum near Sarasota. We didn’t have much luck there. We arrived in plenty of time, but lo and behold, they were holding a special event and decided to close early. We knew about the special event from their website, but there was no notice that they were closing early. The gatekeeper, who mentioned that he was “plankton on the food chain” –we’re sending him an eBook on self esteem–, decided to take our money and let us in anyway. But we didn’t get full disclosure as most of the exhibits were locked up tighter than England’s “Crown Jewels.” We made the best of a bad situation, got a few good images, and left before the gatekeeper’s brow furrowed any further and self esteem plummeted any lower.
Undaunted we moved on and ended up stopping at a roadside vegetable store. Roxanne had the lyrics of Frank Zappa’s “Call Any Vegetable” floating through her head as we photographed the fruits, veggies, and stuff in the store. We took a quick break for an ice cream cone and then we ventured behind the store. There were farm animals, a gorgeous peacock, and lots of cool old wagon wheels and the like. We had a blast photographing the animals and objects with our Lensbaby Composers. When I was processing the images, I experimented in Photoshop with my favorite texture technique using some textures I’ve never used before. New Light Through Old Windows. Indeed. If you get in a rut with your photography, try letting some new light in through old windows.
It’s been a cold Winter in Florida — bone chilling cold. It must be the winter of someone’s discontent, surely not ours. We’re having a grand time in spite of the cold, and Nature Girl (A.K.A. Roxanne) looks darned cute, even sexy all bundled up with a scarf around her neck. Yesterday was another cold day. It felt like someone left the door to Alaska wide open. Undaunted, we packed up our gear, bundled up, and struck out for Myakka River State Park. Roxanne’s been on a street shooting, grunge kick and I’m getting into video. Roxanne took her 5D MKII and left the big gun — her 400 mm lens– at home. I took my 7D with the 24-105mm f/4.0 L series lens, my 70-200mm f/4.0 L series lens, and my Sigma 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. I also have a new ball head for my Manfrotto tripod. Kewl. We arrived at Myakka shortly after 3:00 o’ clock, the time of day just before the light starts doing some really nice stuff. We started down a trail. Roxanne was in full-tilt boogie landscape mode with her 24-105 mm f/4.0 L series lens. I had the same lens on my 7D with the intention of getting some good video, now that I have a proper ball head for panning. Roxanne took off for parts unknown the first time I put the camera on the ball head. Little did I know I had the plate on backwards. What? Me read a manual? I write books on this stuff so I learn it the old-fashioned way: School of Hard Knocks. Even though the plate was on bass ackwards, the ball head worked great.
I was really getting into it. My goal was to put together a 3-minute video of the day’s experience. The wind was howling at what seemed like Gale Force, whoever she was. The Spanish Moss was horizontal, but I was having a great time. That’s when I came upon Fred the Dead Gator. At first I didn’t think he was dead. Then the wind picked up. Fred the Dead Gator was stinking to high heaven. Roxanne said the cold may have done him in. After immortalizing Fred’s earthly remains on video, we ventured on. A few hundred feet up the trail, we saw one of Fred’s relatives. Thankfully, this dude was sunning himself on the opposite bank of the river. I put the 70 – 200 mm lens on my camera and zoomed in. Let’s see; 200mm with a 1.6 focal length multiplication factor means the 35 mm equivalent of 320 mm and the gator was at least 8 feet long which means… Screw the math, he was still too close for comfort. And I swear he winked at me. A little further down the trail, there was a whole pod of gators sunning themselves on the bank, and very close to each other for shared bodily warmth. Yup, it was a six-gator day.
We ended up on the bird walk. There wasn’t many birds there, but there was a herd of deer. Unfortunately, they were too far away to capture with even my longest lens. But the light was beautiful casting a nice warm golden hue on the trees and the wind was howling like a possessed demon. Zooming in with a lens that has been thoroughly chilled is not a fun thing. I know, you guys up north are wondering why I didn’t use gloves. Well, my art would suffer because I’d loose tactile feel and wouldn’t be able to zoom smoothly. Besides, it was above freezing and my fingers didn’t stick to the barrel. All in all it was a fun day. And yes, I did get my 3-minute video. Enjoy.
Cheers,
Doug
The other afternoon, Roxanne and I journeyed to Sarasota. She was armed with her Lensbaby Composer and 85mm f/1.4 lens. I took my tripod and did most of my shooting with my trusty 24-105mm f/4.0 L-Series lens. My goal was to get some shots I would convert to HDR images in Photomatix. But instead of taking one exposure and then exportting three different versions in Lightroom, I created all of my exposures in camera. I set the AEB (auto exposure bracketing) for 3 shots, one with normal exposure as metered by the camera, one at -2.0 EV and one at =2.0 EV. I set the timer for a 2-second delay in order to give the camera time to stablize after pressing the shutter. When I merged the different exposures together in Photomatix, I couldn’t believe the difference. The subtle details really pop when you merge three exposures. I’ve got to experiment more with multiple exposure HDR images, but I’m really pleased with some of the photos I created from this shoot.
Yesterday Roxanne and I started out shooting birds in the local landfill. I know what you’re thinking… But the place is full of birds, including eagles. Unfortunately, I don’t have a long enough lens to get a good shot. Then we went to the Venice Train Station to shoot some HDR images. Armed with our tripods and camera set to bracket each shot by 2 EV, we started shooting the train station. As the sun sank lower, we decided to go for the real grunge and ended up in a nearby industrial park. There’s something about junkyards and decrepit buildings that really comes alive when you run the images through Photomatix.
On Sunday, Roxanne and I piled our equipment into the bird blind, and headed for a MeetUp photo shoot at a cattle ranch in Myakka City. Got to watch your step in cow country. At any rate, there was all sorts of awesome things to photograph: old barns, decrepit farm machinery, gnarly trees; and yes, even cows. The shoot was well organized. We had a great time. after the shoot, we meandered to Marina Jacks to photograph the marina as the sun set. Here’s one shot from the ranch, and one from the marina after a trip through Photomatix. Enjoy.
Take one dreamy Lensbaby shot, import it into Photoshop and then add a couple of layers that are pictures of a texture such as fabric, concrete, or plastic. Play around with the blend mode of the texture layers ’til you see something you like. These look great printed on heavy duty matte or fine art paper.
Sunset is a special time. Unfortunately the dynamic range found in a sunset is much more than a digital camera can handle. Fortunately there are programs like Photomatix that enable you to combine multiple exposures of the same scene and combine them to increase the dynamic range, giving you a result similar to what you see with the naked eye. You can shoot three images at different exposures with the camera securely mounted on a tripod, or shoot a single image in your camera’s RAW format, and then export three different exposures from Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop. For the sunset image you see below, I exported three versions of the same image, one at -2.o EV, one as captured by the camera, and another at +2.o EV.
The City of Venice recently held a Christmas parade. Roxanne and I went downtown with the sole purpose of taking pictures and not watching the parade. Of course it was dark, which meant high ISO Speeds, in my case very high, some as high as ISO 6400. However, Noise Ninja made small work of removing the noise and giving me usable images. Stir in some fun with filters from Nik Multimedia, and I ended up with some interesting stuff. Oh yeah, I also used the Lensbaby Creative Aperture Kit on the Christmas tree, which turned out of focus lights into cool star shapes. Too much fun…
Photographers are always looking for new things and new places to photograph. Sometimes all it takes is driving down a road you’ve never been on before to discover a wonderful place full of photo opportunities. That’s exactly what happened to Roxanne and I today. Originally, we were going to go to Spanish Point: a historic site in Sarasota. Of course they had the audacity to be closed on Thanksgiving Day. So we drove down to Englewood. Our first stop was in a shopping district full of quaint shops and restaurants. After an hour or so, we were on the road again. Our goal was to find an interesting marina. On the way I spotted a derelict house with weathered wood, vines, and photogenic debris. We spent half an hour exploring the relic and moved on. In a few minutes, we meandered down a road we’ve never been on before and found a wonderful spot with boats, birds, and bait shops. Sometimes you can discover great photo opportunities by going someplace you’ve never been before. Next time you go on a photo shoot, take the long way home. You never know what you’ll find. Here are some of the images I captured on Thanksgiving Day:
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