Yesterday saw me at Circuit of the Americas for the first time in 2020. An owner from California contacted me late last week to see if I was available to get some shots of his historic Benetton B198 during an EdgeAddicts track day and I jumped at the chance. Not only was it great to get close to some racing for the first time since the lockdowns started, but I also had complete access to the trackside loop roads (with my car!) with absolutely no other photographers to compete with for space (OK, that’s not quite true – there was one other photographer so we had an average of 3 miles of trackside per person).
It was also my first motorsport outing with the new Olympus 100-400mm lens and it behaved beautifully. The reach of this lens is amazing, it’s sharp all the way to 400mm, and the autofocus is at least as fast and accurate as the Tamron 140-600mm I used with my Nikon system. This picture was shot at an effective focal length of 684mm (the micro four thirds system gives me a crop factor of 2x compared to full frame), shooting through the catch fence at Turn 10 to get that iconic image of the car cresting the rise with the circuit’s famous tower in the background.
For the technically inclined...