Fuji X Pro 1 and action shots YES IT CAN Part3 Indy Cars!
Well I made it to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for "Happy Hour" today. For those of you who are racing illiterate. Happy hour is the last hour of practice when the shade comes over the track and the lap times are usually the fastest of the day. This is my first time of the season seeing the new cars and engines. Normally I work one race before the Indy 500 gets here. Not this year. So after a weekend of soccer pictures off to the Speedway to see what this Fuji X Pro 1 can do with Indy Cars.
Beautiful weather and a small crowd of people allowed me to take my time and try capturing race cars from several locations. I will continue to post more all week. For this week is daily practice leading up to qualifications this weekend.
Besides trying to capture high speed action I was playing more with the B&W. I really like this coming out of the camera. Normally I am using NIK Silver Efix Pro 2, which is the best for B&W conversation, in my humble opinion. But man am I finding it hard to not just let the camera do it.
So what did I learn in my first attempt today. Well to begin with I am rusty. Shooting cars moving at 220-230 MPH takes some learning. Getting myself up to speed normally takes me a good 30 minutes of timing my motion to the cars on the track. Once I have the feel. I am good to go. Otherwise I have a lot of images of empty track.
For those of you who are portrait and landscape photographers. Let me give you an idea of the speed we are dealing with. If you stand out facing the front straight at the start/finish line. Staring straight ahead without turning to see the coming cars. You blink and you will miss half the field of 33 cars. Its that fast. I have a landscape photographer friend who had visited me during practice a few years ago. It took him a full day and a half before he captured a car on the track. He told me hummingbirds were nothing compared to this. Too funny.
So I was in full manual. Shutter speeds were anywhere from 1/250 to 1/1000 depending on how much blur I wanted in the action. The App I kept around 4.0 ish. ISO 200 all day. JPEG Normal. To begin with I kept the servo focus in C. Fuji, if you are reading this. While in C mode make your focal point a box and not a cross OR make the cross darker. It hard to see in the OVF on a bright day. (Minor Issue) This is what I am discovering about the C vs S mode and action. For me at least the C mode works well on action of normal human activity, like my soccer pictures. For bullet fast cars the S was my favorite. And this is why. I could move my focus point. Fuji, who can't I do this in C mode???? So I setup my OVF view to have the focus point all the way to the left. As I am panning and watching the car come int the OVF square. I figured out that The combination of view-to-focus point- to holy sh** hit the shutter put me on target and focus. Thats it!! The beauty of capturing race cars is those drivers are consistent. The shutter lag on the X Pro 1 is constant. The variable is my eye to finger movement. Nail that and you have the image.
So on to the images.
This is is cropped in. Car is doing about 200MPH as it enters turn 1.
The Captain and the Penske crew at practice. Will Power Car.
Love this image. I am at the exit to the pits. Car is moving at about 50-55 MPH at this point. The new chassis look like bat mobiles.
Will Power between practice laps.
This is a good image to show the dynamic range. No blown highlights or clipping in this image. Straight out of the camera, like the rest. Bright sun to shade. I was not ready with camera in hand for this shot. Turn camera on focus, shoot. no problem.
These last two are the cars in the entering the apex of turn one. The first shot is at 1/1000 the second is at 1/250. Cars are starting to accelerate again over 200 MPH. I used S mode on the servo focus for both of these. So the camera is tracking the cars moving away from me.
