As widely anticipated, Marc Marquez won yesterday’s MotoGP race at Circuit of the Americas. Since I posted his picture yesterday, here’s the guy who came in second – Andrea Dovizioso riding for Ducati.
Shooting from outside the fence results in two major problems at CoTA. Firstly, the number of locations that offer a clear view of the track with no fences in the way is very limited indeed. This results in very few different composition choices, I find, and almost no chance of getting detailed, head-on shots of the riders or drivers. The second problem, even if you find one of those rare viewpoints, is that you are very far away from the action. All my rider shots from Saturday were taken using a 150-600mm lens zoomed in most or all the way. I was shooting in DX mode on the D810 which crops the image to just over 50% of the area in the camera (and also boosts my maximum frame rate from 5 to 7) and makes the lens an effective 900mm. In Lightroom I then cropped the final results for artistic purposes and to remove extraneous track area and sections of fence that encroach into the bottom of the frame. Most of the final images end up in the 6-8MP range, perfectly adequate for web use but questionable in prints larger than 12″x8″. Oh, to have the luxury of shooting from inside the fence again!
For the technically inclined...