There was kind of a light turnout for the races today that, actually, wasn't unexpected. GNCC's series kicks off this weekend in Florida and NEOC's series is also underway in Jersey. Facebook chatter from the past week had indications that a number of locals were headed to one or the other and that's pretty much how it played out. There was still some good racing to be had by those who did show up to play though! :)
For me, today became sort of an experimental day. First time using my
new 24-85mm lens that I picked up in place of the
24-70 that I had killed. I picked it up as a factory refurb - $400. ( that's chump change for camera stuff ). I loved that 24-70 - that thing was absolutely killer and a beautifully crafted piece of equipment but .... I had to kick the can around some and really evaluate it - what do I use it for (mostly)? Shooting around f4 - f7'ish at the races grabbing wide angle shots . . . I really didn't use it wide open at 2.8 a whole lot for that really nice blown out of focus background. I do that quite a bit with my other lens - the 70-200 2.8 - not so much with the wide angle though. $1800 vs $400. $400 wins for what I'm using it for. {shrug shoulders}
So the new lens got mud splattered and dirty -- it's "broken in" now and I think I managed to get a couple of keepers with it. ( none going into this post - haven't really looked at those ones yet )
I also toyed around with an idea that I have seen before from an online class that I took where you throttle the white balance in camera down to give everything a "blue'ish" tone (make it cool), and then offset the cool blue tones by using orange (warming) gels on the flashes against your targets as they come into shooting range. Initially I took the white balance down a bit to far - around 3200k or so - and indeed everything wound up being VERY blue! I wound up running around 4800k or so which didn't seem to bad. The shots in this post were done using this setup.
I was also trying to play with / work on my composition - ie; get shots with more than just a singular rider in them. Those can be, and are nice but, it becomes a photo of a racer (as in singular) on a bike or quad. Is there a race happening or is it just some person on a machine? I want to learn how to better have my photo's tell a story... does that make sense?
Anyway -- I have a number of images to go through so that I can get the keepers post up to the galleries.
More later....
-=- jd -=-
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