2016 Daytona 24 Hours

Carbon monoxide is some serious stuff and I'm glad to hear you got it under control.

You may have heard on our local news a few weeks ago about a construction crew was doing some work in an apartment complex and they accidentally left a generator running inside one of the units and left for the day. The carbon monoxide built up and a couple tenants went to the ER not knowing what was wrong. They quickly investigated and found the source and a half dozen other people affected. Thankfully it was early enough that nobody had gone to sleep or there might have been a different outcome.

On a slightly brighter note, here are a couple pics of the crowd on Saturday before the Grid Walk. The first one shows how crowded it was in the garage area and the second shows the crowd trying to make it's way down to the open gate that gets you to the grid. That gate is down by those palm trees and I took this picture about a half hour after they opened that gate with the grid walk scheduled to be one hour. Turning towards the track there is another gate almost directly in front of me which the cars drive in and out of and they chose not to open it this time.
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

FYI IMSA has uploaded the Daytona 24 Hour coverage to Youtube. Looks like they have separated it into 3 hour chunks.

https://www.youtube.com/user/UnitedSportsCar

 

I was surprised how slow Sabine Schmitz was in the car as I was watching her laptimes on timing and scoring. She even admitted that she was not fast enough to drive the car during an interview

 

maybe they shouldn't have bumped CdP out of the car for her after all

(I'm assuming she didn't bring $$ but who knows)

 

Lambo Huracans= New chassis/tech Ferrari 458= Last generation chassis/tech
No way IMSA is going to let an old chassis beat a new one. I experienced the same thing in 08 and 09 with Grand Am

 

All Huracan's engines were impounded after race. Apparently some questions about the restrictors....

1.5 sec difference in GTD, across all cars, is a BoP miss.

 

Thank you for all of your excellent photos!

 

Nice photos indeed. Thanks. I enjoyed the race this year more than any of the recent years for some reason. GTLM and GTD look to be fun to watch this year.

Interesting to hear about the Huracans' restrictor plates. Hope sanctioning body does the right thing.

 

You ain't kidding! On our 458 which let's not forget is a 6 year old car, they cut our revs by 200 rpm to 8200 (where the car really doesn't like to work), reduced our refueling to 29,5mm and then took 20 kegs off, which does nothing for you at Daytona....

It was interesting though to watch the Lambos power past us Un the banking as well as the GTLMs and certain of the protos...

At least Lambo messed up and didn't win....

 

Ha! That is a massive difference. You would think they would slow down intentionally with that kind of a delta.

 

A few pics from the race
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Nice set!

Seemed like the sun never cooperated and I know how hard it is to shoot in the dark.

I appreciate the variety in your selections and I really like the garage shot of the BMW.

I hope you post more

 

Thanks! I have a lot more to post once I get the time.

Most of my night pics ended up pretty grainy. Why does that happen and is there anyway to fix it now? How do I prevent that in the future?

 

I think the " grainy " is from a high ISO setting.

You probably weren't using a flash so you had to set your ISO way up and the higher you go the grainer it gets. That grain is also known as " noise ".

How much grain depends on the camera model and generally speaking, the higher end the camera the better it handles the problem. Not to say your camera is low end, my middle of the road Canon 7D gets grainy pretty quick as I bump up the ISO.

You didn't say your pics were grainy right out of the camera or your final processed pics ended up grainy. Out of the camera is from the ISO but you could make them grainy depending on how you edit and process them. Many photo editing software have a " noise " filter which you can apply to your pictures which will reduce the grain but soften the focus which you then have to sharpen a bit.

Shooting after dark at the track is a challenge to say the least

 

Thanks. i believe I had ISO set at 100. No flash.

Camera is a Nikon D3300 that I got as a part of the black friday package deal a lot of stores were running.

I am also new to Photoshop so I will do some research to see what I can do there.


The pictures look great when viewed on the tiny camera screen...not so great once I put them on the computer.

 

ISO set at 100 is VERY low and great for a sunny day and should show no noise at all. I was thinking the noise begins to show when you dial it up past 1000 and more depending on the camera model. My 7D goes up to 6400. I don't think you can shoot at night without a flash with your ISO set at 100. You would end up with a very slow shutter speed and your pictures don't show that.

I'm not that technical or adept at shooting in all kinds of conditions as I tend to shoot the same things in the same circumstances so I only know what I need to know for that.

Maybe someone will chime in and help us fill in the blanks.

 

Here is my video from the 2016 Rolex 24


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nTwWo--Bcg[/ame]

 

Shooting at ISO 100 shouldn't show any visible noise unless you are enlarging (cropping). When you blow it up past 1:1 of course you will get grain (which in digital terms is noise).
I was shooting most of my night shots at ISO 800 - 1000 on a 7D which is not the best camera for high ISO. I prefer not to use a flash for night shots at the race track although it can be interesting for certain cars that have reflective markings.
Moving around the track so that you were shooting as the cars passed under the overhead lights would help. Honestly if you were really at ISO 100 I'm amazed you got anything useful as the shutter speed would have been very slow and the aperture wide open to capture the image at all. Even in bright sun the speed of the cars usually requires at least ISO 200 to get a fast enough shutter when the cars are coming right at you. Of course, when panning you want the shutter down below 1/125 and with a lot of practice you can get that down to 1/30 or even 1/15 up to about 200mm.

 

Here is what one of the pro IMSA photographers brought to Daytona just to show what it takes to "do it right":
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Perhaps I am wrong about what it was set at. I spent a lot of time playing around with different settings to get pics I liked. The majority of the shots I took I was panning with the car as it came past me. I really like the shots with the car in focus and the background blurred.

The best shots I got were Sunday morning in the infield. The shots I posted above of cars 2, 66, 62, 48 and 540 were all taken that morning.

 

The day it takes over $100,000 in camera gear to " do it right " is the day I take up painting.

 

All of your settings can be viewed in any image editing software. In Photoshop it is under "File" and then File Info.

 

Do it right in this case for someone with, I think, 18 clients paying for pictures.

 

Can you tell a bit more about the equipment?

I'm looking at it and see them marked in different colors. If I had to guess I'd say each color was a group and each group went to a different photographer so all that would be for several photographers.

I understand the value of having backups but for one photographer to haul all that around seems a bit ridiculous because the equipment is so similar. Why would one need four 600 mm lens especially if they are all the same aperture.

Honestly, if ONE photographer needs all that he is doing it wrong.

 

It was posted on a forum, I don't really know anymore about it.