Your experiences of photo shooting in last event F1GP

[birddog114]

Hi All,

Last week, Our forum has number of members attended F1GP in Melbourne. I would like to hear all of your experiences, observations of photos shooting in the F1GP
- Tripod & monopod: How are they flexibility? if you can bring it in.
- Where and what're the vantage points?
- Dis + Advantage of long zoom + short, fast, slow lenses?
Many of you will tell people on this board all your findings to improve or adjusting the way to shoot in those events.

[gstark]

Very quickly ...

According to the rules, no tripods or monopods, and no lenses greater than 200mm focal length equivalency.

Also, no unopened drink bottles, and no glassware (for dribks) of any kind.

Security at the gate consisted of a cursory check of our backpacks; they only saw what I showed them. Didn't even open the section that contained the camera and lenses; the monopod in my hand didn't even raise an eyelid.

In this regard, there was even greater slackness this year than we had experienced in prior years.

Around the track there are very few vantage points available to the public. The safety fences provide protection to track marshalls and the public, while trying to keep fast moving parts of cars within the confines of the racetrack.

There's a hill inside the track around turn 5, and if you can camp there you might get a reasonable view; we saw one of the Jags slide into the wall near there in 2000 during Saturday practice.

By far the best places are where you can see a headlong view of the cars as they approach a corner.

Where we were, in the Prost Stand, we could see the cars slowing for turn 15, execute that turn and into a short straight heading down towards us, before hitting turn 16 and onto the pit straight. We then had a tailview of the car all the way down the pit straight and into turn 1, about a kilometer away.

Getting seats towards the back of the stands helps you to clear the top of the safety fence; much of our view of the main striaght was unobstructed.

Once inside, we had no issues with our use of our gear.

I found the 80-400 to be almost ideal for the day; 300-500 would have been perfect.

I tried manual focussing (prefocussing on an area on the track) early on the Saturday but that left me very disappointed, whereas the autofocusing of the 80-400 had little problem in coping with everything the day threw our way.

[redline]

i didn't go this year but my friend managed to sneak in his 100-400L series lenses.
I went last year using a f5 and 80-200 combo the fence really makes the af go nuts and limiting focus really doesn't help. I also missed getting a shot of Micheal S. leaving the vodophone stand into his heli.

I thought it was only no tripods, i doubt wether they could tell the diffence between a hiking stick and a monopod.

[kipper]

Redline well the guy who stopped me using my lens on the Friday knew the difference between a teleconvertor and the rest of my lens

[kipper]

The only downside I noticed of being at one stand was the limitation of point of views of the car. While Gary probably had great front on and rear end action, I had one of the best views of the side of the car. Now I suppose I could of left the stand and tried moving around the track into General Admission areas but why pay top $ if you're not going to sit in your seat. The ultimate would be to have a press pass, some of those guys were sitting near the kitty litter at the end of turn 2 shooting right up the straight. I envied them!

[onimod]

IMO unless you have a press pass it's a pretty frustrating event from a shooting perspective.
The guys designing and building the fence do so with the idea that if you can see the track without looking through the fence, then it's unsafe...and so there are very few areas where you can get a clean view. I was up in the Prost stand on Friday too, and yes from the top you can see over, but the cars a 200 metres away and heading away from you - no great shots are coming from that. I got some okay shots from an arty sort of perspective with blurred fences and the like, but nothing I'd regard as great.
The best stuff I did get was was of the historic cars - McLaren F1 roadcar, Lambo, Exige etc. where you can actually get close to the car.