The 2013-14 winter mud & snow scrambles race series at the
Square Deal Riders (Belden Hill as it is apparently more commonly known to old timers... ) kicked off today under generally decent weather temperature-wise. It was an "ugly" day with heavily overcast skies, but not terribly cold. The race had an overall small'ish turnout but there were still probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 or so competitors that showed up to get in some racing. It is hunting season and we are just coming off of the Thanksgiving holiday... these could be contributing factors to the turnout.
In any case - the racing was pretty good, and I was out there catching some of it with my "throw back" camera kit. I don't know why but I decided to "go old school" and just brought a very simple kit with me today. I used my older D300 body and a little fixed focal length 24mm lens. I also decided that I was going to use my old lighting kit that consists of my old SB28's and
Paul Buff Cybersyncs. No "fancy schmancy" TTL SB-600's and
pocket wizards today. As it turned out - I shot the better part of the day not using the flashes at all. (
I was lazy and didn't feel like setting up the flashes .... ) I did eventually pull them out later in the day though as the already gloomy skies began to get even gloomier and light was beginning to taper off. I'd already decided that I was going to be restricting myself to a max 1/320th of a second shutter speed (
manual flashes - no high speed sync / TTL voodoo) so I also shot in shutter priority some today too. Basically I spent the day playing... I tossed quite a few shots -- 1/250th and below is really not quite fast enough (without any flash) to score a good number of keepers... that old D300 just doesn't grab focus nearly as fast as the D700 does either. But -- thats ok -- I still managed to pull of some keepers and they'll be going up to
the galleries in a day or so.
Anyway - SDR Round 1 is down, next Saturday the 7th is Round 2 of Broome Tioga's winter series.
More later...
