Some Shots From the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg
Well, they’re actually shots from practice runs and qualifying from Saturday, the day before the race (The Grand Prix race was Sunday but I wasn’t able to shoot the actual race because of a prior commitment on Sunday). I was shooting for the City of St. Pete’s Website (thanks to my buddy Andy Gregory who got me the gig, and covered the race on Sunday).
Above: Here’s the rear view taken down low (on my knees) from a break in the retaining wall heading into the straightaway. Specs: Nikon D4 at f/4, at 1/2000 of a second at 200 ISO. Using a 400mm f/2.8 lens at f/4 because I was using a 1/4 tele-converter, so it was actually taken at 550mm.
Anyway here’s a few shots from the day (and I’ll leave the rest to the captions).
Above: Here’s an overhead panning shot taken from up in the control tower at the airport (more on this in a moment). Specs: I lowered the shutter speed to 1/80 of a second (to get wheel spin — if I can clearly see the wheels I switch to these specs — if the car is more straight on, then I got to f/2.8 or f/4 and use a really fast shutter speed). The f/stop had to be increased to f/11 to get a proper exposure.
Above: Here’s a perspective you don’t always see — thanks to Rob Neff for the first time ever we got access to the 360° walkway around the control tower at Albert Whitted Field (the race runs over one of their runways), which is where I got this tight-in shot with my 400mm.
Above: When I was up on the airport control tower I spotted a photo hole (official large cut-out area of the fence for media photographers assigned to the event) I had never seen before and I headed over there and was able to get this low perspective as the cars were coming out of a hairpin turn heading to the straightaway.
When cars are coming straight toward the camera like this (where you really can’t see the sides of the wheels), I tend to shoot at a high-shutter speed and freeze the motion. Not every shot has to have spinning wheels,especially since when the car is coming directly at you the tires don’t have visible treads to spin like normal cars (see popular F-1 shooter James Moy here, here, here and here). That being said, I have hundreds (actually probably more than 1,000) of spinning wheel side shots from this race (as seen in the third shot from the top).
Above: I put on my 1.4 tele-converter to get this rear view of my favorite car (looks wise), as they came out of that hairpin and started down the straightaway VERY close to the wall.
Above: Between the morning practice runs and the qualifying runs in the afternoon they had a “Historic Sportscar Racing” session where I got this shot.
Above: Another shot from the “Historic Sportscar Racing” session.
Above: Rob got this iPhone shot of me from up on the Control Tower (thanks Rob!).
Thanks for letting me share these, and here’s wishing you a kick-butt Monday (even though I know that’s an oxymoron). Cheers, –Scott