We did the North American Grand Prix tour in our M coupe this year and took a LOT of pictures. I'll be putting up more pics as I have time to sort through the literally thousands we took.

Cars in the first practice session. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt3.html) (Click the pic for a 100% crop.)

The first part of the trip itself. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt.html)

Nice pictures. Its always neat to take a road trip to an event. Half the fun is getting there.

Great pics and nice commentary :buttrock

Great pics and nice commentary :buttrock

I concur. Thanks for sharing rlcanon.

Is that turn 6? That's where I was sitting.

Great pics. Looks like you were very close to the track and had a long lens. I was at the GP also.
MikeG

Details on camera equipment used? :)

We did the North American Grand Prix tour in our M coupe this year and took a LOT of pictures. I'll be putting up more pics as I have time to sort through the literally thousands we took.

Cars in the first practice session. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt3.html) (Click the pic for a 100% crop.)

The first part of the trip itself. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt.html)
very nice pictures....

did you also go to the USGP? I thought I remember saying you were. I saw a silver M Coupe with Montyoa flags on the hood and wondered if it was you, but forgot to look for the texas plates to see.

awesome pics. I never noticed that difference between schumi and barichello's mirrors.

Good eye.

We were in grandstand 33 which is turn 6 I guess. Section 2 about a third of the way up so I could get some pretty good shots over the catch fence. You can see in some of the pics that the catch fence is visible as a bit of a blur at the bottom.

We got a little carried away with the camera gear this year, but I think with pretty good results. The body is a Canon 20D with a Canon EF 100-400mm f/ 4.5/5.6L USM IS on a Manfrotto Magfibre monopod. I set the autofocus point to the center and the AF mode to AI servo which worked pretty well in that situation. I would set the auto focus on one of the orange signs down the track about where I wanted to start shooting a car and the servo mode would pull focus automatically as the car approached. The series of Barichello with the fan in his intake shows how well it worked even at they began the turn. The closer crops from the side are after the cars made the turn; I cropped them to eliminate the blur of the catch fence and to accentuate the driver's helmet and their relaxed grip on the wheel.

We drove from Austin to Montreal for the Canadian GP (our first time there) then back through Indy for the USGP (our fourth). I'm not running a front plate so it's a little harder to catch the Texas plates, but no JP flags in any case. The one thing I'm kicking myself in the butt for is not taking the camera to dinner on Friday night. We sat at a sidewalk table and say Kimi across the street and down the block, Bernie Eccelstone crossed the street to within 15 feet of us, and Montoya and his family stopped to discuss where to have dinner just 6 feet away from us! The 17-85 ef-s walk around lens would have been perfect for that! The next night we made sure to bring the camera and our only brush with fame was a soap actor! Ha ha!

http://128.83.80.200/roadtrip/6.jpg

We got lots of great ground hog shots, even if we missed all the F1 luminaries. If they were only dressed in team wear! Ha ha!

http://128.83.80.200/roadtrip/3.jpg

beautiful pics, do you have a portfolio online we could check out?

do you have a portfolio online?
Thanks; I'm pretty early in the learning curve. Not really a portfolio... Over the years we've used decent point and shoot digital cameras to document our wheeling trips (http://128.83.80.200/taco/) and our M coupe road trips (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/) (trips in the right hand column on both pages). (Oddly, what generates the most traffic on my sites is a largely tongue in cheek attack of poor off-road steering system designs and their users called the scary steering pages (http://128.83.80.200/taco/scarysteering.html). A Google search on "scary steering" brings the page back as the first link.)

Since going d-slr just before this last road trip we started practicing with the camera and got some decent wildlife and pet shots (http://128.83.80.200/20d/) that are up on a page. Some are better than others and some are poorly post-processed since it was sort of an experimental phase...

I'm kicking around the idea of a more traditional online portfolio but I've looked around at other people's stuff enough that I'm too intimidated presently. Maybe as my stuff improves and I have a little more depth of material. For the moment I'm more comfortable with posting trip write-ups and snapshots of varying quality.

I'll have a bunch more pictures from the Canadian and US GPs (Grands Prix?) and the road trip up next week.

I dunno, your pics are pretty awesome. I can see I'm going to have to score me one of those lenses later down the track when I've got good with what I have presently.

so you are a profesional photgrapher? Thats a lot of equipment for a hobby.

Thats a lot of equipment for a hobby.
It is in a way, but I'm pretty serious about my hobbies once I get focused (no pun intended). And, as my G/F says, I'm hell bent on whoring out our road trips on the internet. To that end both of us were getting to the point that our cameras weren't getting us what we wanted at the extreme ends of the spectrum, her with macro and both of us on the telephoto end. Then prosumer D-SLR bodies fnally hit a price/feature/performance ratio that was compelling about the time we had a big road trip coming up so I jumped in. I figure it's the last body I'll buy for a long time, and glass is always a good investment. One good thing about digital photography is that once the initial equipment investment is made there isn't much in the way of continuing overhead with no film or processing, especially since I can host the pics from work.

Now this is a lot of equipment for a hobby! Ha ha!
http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt70.jpg

We did the North American Grand Prix tour in our M coupe this year and took a LOT of pictures. I'll be putting up more pics as I have time to sort through the literally thousands we took.

Cars in the first practice session. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt3.html) (Click the pic for a 100% crop.)

The first part of the trip itself. (http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/nagpt.html)

Thanks RL. Great pixs! I can't imagine a better city to host an F1 race than Montreal.
I made that trek there & the ppl & town are second to none.
I gathered you have pixs from the Indy race also?

Thanks again! I can't get enough of those jets on wheels.

I can't imagine a better city to host an F1 race than Montreal. I made that trek there & the ppl & town are second to none.We really enjoyed Montreal as well and wished we'd had more time to check out the city. Could have done without the heat and humidity, though. We left south central Texas to get away from that and seem to have brought it with us!


I gathered you have pixs from the Indy race also?
Still sorting through those; seem to have gotten some good ones from the turn 10 terrace during a practice session, not so much through the catch fence at turn one during qualifying and the "race". I do have a fair shot of the beer a disgruntled fan threw onto turn one that Schummi says he could smell from his car, though! Ha ha!
http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/turn1beer.jpg

http://128.83.80.200/mcoupe/turn1beer.jpg[/IMG]

Classic!