A few pictures from the A & B riders final test section at the Concho Enduro near Blackwell, Texas. Oliver and I entered the race in the C class, how did we do? …lets just say we finished.

MotoGP at Circuit of the Americas, what a good weekend. The MotoGP guys know how to put on a good event, someone is always on track, close racing. Watching the bikes at this circuit is great. Still wish they had more photo holes…

This was the first race at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas for Formula One. It turned out to be a neat track, I love watching them go through the esses, especially when you get behind them and watch them change directions. As photogenic as this track could be, with out a photo pass there just aren’t that many opportunities to get through the fence down low. I really wish they would put more photo holes for us amateurs, I feel the Indianapolis track did a much better job at this. Ah well, still a good time.

Freestone County Raceway is about an hour and a half south of Dallas and it holds one of the national AMA Motocross rounds.  A friend and I went down there for race day and took a few pictures.

 

This was the first Motocross race I’ve been to and I really enjoyed it.  I like the more open, less vertical aspects compared to Supercross.  From a photo perspective its hard to beat, I was able to get as close to the track as I wanted.  Low fences everywhere and the jumps really let you play around with pictures more than at road races.

 

One thing I had noticed looking at various dirtbike pictures is the shutter speed most photographers use is quite high, especially when compared to normal motorsport photography.  Motion blur is usually the only cue in a picture that a race car on a track is going fast, otherwise it looks parked.  With dirtbikes, the lean angle, dirt roost, and of course being airborne are all cue for speed regular cars don’t have.  I think this leads to most dirtbike photographs having a high shutter speed to catch the roost and the action.  As someone who typically photographs cars on track this troubles me.  There’s gotta be motion blur!

 

I made it a point to keep my shutter speed pretty low for most of these shots.  I was at 1/60th – 1/80th for most side pan shots.  I jumped to 1/100 – 1/200 for shots of bikes going away and coming towards me, which is still low for cars moving “with” the camera.  I even tried a few pan/zoom shots to get a subtle motion blur while bikes were moving “with” the camera.

 

The pictures!

 

Oliver and I took 2 weeks off work and hit Colorado and Utah. We started off on the front range in an off road area called Rampart Range, then headed west to the Taylor Park area. Did some single track and some cool passes, then hit the San Juans near Silverton. After a week in Colorado we moved over to Moab, Utah for an entirely different landscape.
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A quick 3 day October weekend trip with my buddy Oliver on motorcycles. We decided to do a little exploring in the national forests of Arkansas on this particular weekend. Great weather, great roads, and lots of fun, naturally. Again, I’ve focused on action shots here, I’m not sure if I am getting better at these, but I am learning.




You can read our ride report over at Adventure Rider here. It includes the full details of our trip, including maps and GPS files. It also has all of Oliver’s pictures as well. My name on the forum is “child”, Oliver is “enderthex”.
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Vacation on two wheels in the mountains of Colorado. My good friend Oliver and I decide a week of camping and mountain passes would be just what the doctor ordered. We stick mainly to mountain jeep roads in the San Juan Mountains near Silverton. I tried to carry my motorsports photo experience over to taking pictures while on the trail.
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Autocross is driving around cones against the clock. Every year the UTA FSAE team invites other FSAE teams down to Texas to take part in a 2 day autocross extravaganza. I haven’t been on the team in a few years, but had been invited to drive after doing a few repairs. In between driving I snapped a few pictures.

If you’re in one of these pictures let me know if you want a bigger version. If you’re not in any of the pictures above and you drove that weekend, let me know. There are many more pictures that aren’t posted.

Formula one has left the US for the time being, this leaves MotoGP as the only world class series to hold races in the US. Fortunately for us, they hold 2 races here, one in California at Laguna Seca (amazing place) and the other at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. California being a 24 hour drive and only 2 of us making it to the race this year- we chose Indy.

As a side note, I’d like to shamefully admit that I forgot about these pictures. I closed on a house while on this trip, so as soon as I returned from Indy it was house house house full tilt. It’s kind of interesting coming back to the pictures though after a few months out of mind. Kind of a “I took these?!” kinda thing… neat.

Elkhart Lake, Wisconson; a long drive from Texas and home to Road America. A friend and I decided to take a road trip to the ALMS/Champ Car race there with our dirt bikes in tow. What an amazing track first of all. Tucked into the hills, its got a lot of charactor and lots of opertunity to get up close and personal with the track. If you can, I highly reccomend taking some sort of 2 wheeled off road transport to get around. It makes getting from corner to corner easy and FUN.

Honestly I bet I had just as much fun hot rodding from corner to corner up and down the hillsides on my motorcycle as I did watching/photographing the cars. We eneded up camping at the track for the weekend and boy was it worth it. Nothing like waking up to the sound of race cars 75 yards away.

Its that time again, I missed the previous year’s F1 race while in Spain unfortunately, but I made it to indy in 07 which sadly turned out to be the last year for USGP in the US, again. This year was a little different than the previous years as my friends and I got to go into the McLaren pits after the last practice session Saturday. Plus everyone actually raced, which was nice, since the last race I had been to all of the Michelin cars pulled off after the warm up lap.

The McLaren pits were pretty awesome, we were a good 20 feet closer to the cars than they let you get Thursday when the pits are open to the public, plus, plus, plus, they were totally tearing down the cars readying them for qualifying. Sadly I can’t upload the pictures I have per McLaren’s request. They were actually splitting the transmissions off of the back of the engines. I was snapping pictures like MAD zooming into the inside of the transmission casing before the guys noticed me and made me stop. Afterwards I felt bad about it, I still do a little bit. We were there as guests to kinda look in and get a close view and I kinda went camera/engineer nerd and started snapping pictures of computer screens and as much F1 innards as I could. All of the mechanics were mad at me and the McLaren contact that hooked us up kinda got grief from the team about it. I offered to delete the photos, but he said it was cool, so long as the images didn’t get out… So unfortunately for you I’m gonna respect his wishes. It was neat nonetheless and it helped make this last trip to Indy that little bit more special.

I also have pictures from McLaren’s factory in Woking that I can share, I’ll post those in my blog some time in the future.

This year was kinda a bum year for pictures. I didn’t walk away with as many keepers as I had in the past. There were more than double the number of amateur photographers there than years prior. Getting to my favorite spots was difficult which kind of lead to me not trying as hard as I usually do. Looking back on it I should have taken the opportunity to find new, spots less traveled, but I didn’t. Live and learn I guess.

Champ Car was pretty well dead at this point. All the big names from the golden days have long been gone, save Paul Tracy, and the field was pretty small. Fortunately though they were with the American Le Mans series, which is just swell. Unfortunately they were crammed into a little street circuit in Houston. It was a pretty bad layout for onsite spectators, especially for taking pictures with no press pass. Oh well, I played with what I could get, it was still a fun trip. Most of the racing was at night which makes for even worse picture taking, I had borrowed an external flash though and it helped some, though I had no idea what i was doing.

Motorcycles in the form of MotoGP returned to the United States in July of 2005 to quite possibly the best track in the country. Me and 3 other fellows set our sights on California and drove non stop from DFW to Montery for the race. If you’ve never been to Laguna Seca, GO, it is amazing the amount of elevation the track covers. The track simply does not come across on the TV or video games, it gains and looses elevation like no ones business. Couple that with beautiful bikes running around on the edge of traction, and you’ve got yourself an event.

I messed with some more non standard aspect ratio crops on this batch. There are a bunch in this set, some may seem a bit redundant, but it’s hard to pick favorites sometimes. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to take pictures at this event. The elevation made for some of the most interesting shooting of motorsports I’ve done. From the corks screw panning downwards with the bikes as they loose elevation to looking down on breaking zones from a hill top, this track was fun fun fun to shoot. Thanks for looking.

United States Grand Prix!!! 2005 came and went and I made yet another trek to Indiana for the Formula One race. I played around with various crops this time around, after talking with my roommate, I think I need to put less stock in maintaining the original aspect ratio of the image. So let me know what you think there. There isn’t a whole lot to say except maybe… vroom vroom.

F1USGP! My first Formula One event ever. Me and a group of guys from the UTA FSAE team rented a van under the masquerade of a school trip and booked it non stop to Indianapolis Indiana. Its a great event, and pretty good for viewing the cars. Its not as scenic as some of the older tracks around the US, but as far as seeing cars go around as a spectator, its hard to beat. If you’ve never been to an F1 race, GO. Its a must see, the rate at which these things change direction is simply amazing, then there’s the noise, the beautiful noise.