Pinetown Rally Streets

Pictures from shoot at Pinetown Rally
Model/s: VW and Toyotas
Make-Up: Drivers and navigators may have been but hard to ask as driving by at high speed
Cars makeup consisted of lots or racing parts and stickers
Photographer: Henrik

Equipment : Canon 40D
Lens : Canon 70-200 F2.8 l
Aperture : F2.8
ISO : 1600
Shutter speed : 1/100
Other Equipment : 580 EXII 430EX Manfrotto monopod

I love motorsport. I really enjoy it. LOTS. Part of the reason I enjoy it soo much is its a team sport and I don't mean just driver and navigator. What I'm talking about here is the behind the scenes stuff. Ive had the privilege of being able to hang around and see these guys at work. The cars can come in and about a quarter of the car is missing or damaged I'm not kidding about that either. These guys from the team manager to the coffee maker will slave through the night to make sure the car is prepared and ready to run the next morning.It goes something like this Team manager " We need an engine changed the gearbox changed the front suspension needs changing and brakes need new pads. " teams chief mechanic goes " Is that all ? " Team manager goes "Thats it !! how long?" Chief mechanic goes " MMM 15 for motor 15 for the box 25 for front suspension and 5 for coffee. Thats 60mins chief." OK so maybe Im exaggerating a bit but really the team repairing the car work at a pace I wish that all mechanics could work at and they do it right and in sometimes very unfavourable conditions. These guys are what will make a team win or loose and are as important as the driver and navigator. Im glad to see motorsport is being supported by the fuel guys and quite a few new sponsor names are starting to appear on the cars. This is good. The motorsport community has been hurt by a lot of sponsors moving to other sports as they feel their companies will receive more exposure at these other sporting events. Having said this one needs to realise that many of the guys that are now competing, are doing so from their own pockets, and the big factory teams are only awarding the top drivers spots. Yes the manufactures try to help the privateers by offering parts at discounted rates but still it takes lots of money to prepare a half decent rally car. All of the cars really were nicely turned out and I'm sure it was a bit of extra spit and polish for the crowds and sponsors benefit. Thanks teams all the cars looked super. This rally stage was held on the streets of Pinetown and even though the stage does not really make that much of a difference to standings of the Rally drivers, Its still a whole lot of fun to watch and needless to say the drivers and navigators do their utmost to impress the crowd. I say it wont make much difference to the standings as the stage is only about 2.5km long and all tar most of the other rally stages are 15kms plus and on these stages you really need to be on your toes and serious driving skill to just stay on the dirt not even to mention to do good times and of course you cant achieve the speeds that you can with a tar surface. It may not be the important part of the race but it does bring the rallying to the people and up the awareness of the sport and better exposure to the sponsors oh and its real fun to watch - did I mention that?

From a photographic point of view my choice of taking pictures of at this stage was the about the worst you could possibly think of, we are talking high iso and flashes and crowds that can be rather uncooperative at times. But hey if you set yourself easy challenges you generally don't learn too much. I started out with using my 580EXII flash on my camera and then placed a slave on the ground with a bare bulb Tupperware light modifier on top of it. Hey that light modifier was a real steal (literally from the mother in law's kitchen cupboard) and works really well.
In these situations I really will have to invest in a set of pocket wizards Canons we trigger by the light thing did not work very well and the flashes had to be close. Crap system on Canon's part but at least it goes off if you at just the right angle etc. That ruled out lighting from a distance so 580 on top and just in front of the safety fences was a 430 on slave a nice marshal placed it there for me. I would have liked to do more with the lighting but due to limitations the pictures I don't think came out so bad. I learned a few things but those I will tell in a later post. I picked this corner because its a corner after a long straight and heavy breaking will let those brake discs glow. As it turns out I got a few pictures of just that. Please if you are one of the competitors please let me know. If you are wondering I have many other photos at least one for every competitor that participated.
That panning with the subject skill came in very handy. I used a monopod for supporting the lens and I feel that after a tripod a monopod is the most important piece of equipment in ones equipment line up. Even if you have a IS lens it helps to support the camera and your arms dont have to keep on working as hard. The flash helps freeze the action but to frame the shot you need to pan with the car as it wizzs by.
I dont really talk much about post production but to be honest here the iso 1600 requires noise reduction. I find that Canon's own DPP software does a really good job of the noise reduction. Also I found myself increasing the exposure by about 1 stop or so. Most of my post production stuff is a levels watermark and size reduction.
Well next time I get to photograph the event maybe I will have some pocket wizards.