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Welcome to my homepages! My name is Samuli Vahonen and in these pages I tell about my hobbies, mainly about photography and things related to it. You can find more precise information about me from the About me page.

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Suomeksi: Kaikki muut sivut ovat englanniksi paitsi Samun moottoriurheilu kuvat.

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Pages visited: 1412, Pictures viewed: 1801

News

2008-07-05 8 pictures from Seitseminen National Park added

I made another trip to Seitseminen today. This time I brought my bicycle with me and drove the car to Kirkas-Soljanen parking lot and then cycled from there route: Lieslampi, Tuulimäki, Pitkäjärvi, Karhukivi, Tulusmäki and back to Kirkas-Soljanen. Based on the experience I can recommend this route, however I would avoid it few days after heavy rains. I had just a normal bicycle, so there is no need to have mountain bike or anything fancy for this route.

Compared to hiking bicycling is faster - for photography too fast - I think I have missed many nice places because I had to concentrate on bicycling. Therefore I don't think I will continue this tradition. Also the tripod once fall from bike, and I'm not so keen on replacing any carbon fiber parts of it...

There are 8 pictures added to picturebank.

2008-07-02 Nature photos from few shootings added

Being busy with motorsport has caused also nature photos to collect inside Apple Aperture. While starting my summer holidays "softly" (every other day work and every other day holiday ;-) I decided to process the few photos which I yet haven't published:
- 2008-06-06 The Flying Dutchman
- 2008-06-08 Korpilahti
- 2008-06-22 Birgitta's trail at Valkeakoski / Lempäälä border
- 2008-06-23 Hervantajärvi forest in light rain
- 2008-06-30 Iso-Keurujärvi, Lempäälä
- 2008-07-02 "Harjukierros 6km"-trail, Seitseminen National Park
Or view all of these added photos.

Hallila Herkkuenduro (driven in Myrskylä) photos are also coming, hopefully on Friday. It was second "mud race" in a row and I really hope that in next weekend at Vekaranjärvi it would not be raining...

2008-06-20 MAMK-Enduro 2008

Photos from MAMK-enduro 2008 has been added to picturebank. Race was driven at last weekend but I didn't have time to publish the photos before now. Event itself was not so nice due to constant rain, which caused that stage 3 was driven only once even it was planned to be driven 3 times... Naturally I was prepared to be all the time in stage 3... I can understand thou that they didn't drive the stage 2nd and 3rd time - the track started to have muddy holes which can eat enduro bike so that only the saddle and handlebar is above the surface...

During the whole event it was raining. I protected the camera with Kata E-702 - it covered also pretty well Canon EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM and naturally completly other lenses with their hoods. I didn't have any personal rain gear but since the weather forecast said that it will be raining I decided to go to Partiokauppa and purchased Marmot PreCip jacket and pants. They worked pretty well considering I was in constant rain for 5 hours.

2008-06-08 ISDE tukikilpailu (Enduro)

On Sunday I was in Enduro race called ISDE tukikilpailu (tuki = support, kilpailu = race), which was organized to raise money to send team to ISDE enduro race. Weather was generally nice and sunny but there were 15 minute hail storm as well... Photos from ISDE Tukikilpailu 2008 (48 photos). Photography point of view this enduro race was very interesting. I had a change to use my new Canon EF300mm f/2.8 L IS USM lens. It performed very well. The autofocus speed and accuracy is from different planet than on other L-series primes I hava (85L, 135L, 200L2.8). Even the weight wasn't problem even I was a little afraid can I carry it and take photos for 8 hours. I took about 2400 photos during the event, mainly due to using the continous high speed mode on the camera to get the best moment. I went through the photos quickly on Sunday and the "keeper rate" was pretty good: 48 photos seem so good that I could publish them (I never just dump all the photos to internet like majority of the photographers do).

2008-06-05 300/2.8

I got today my Canon EF300mm f/2.8 L IS USM. I don't like white lenses so I also got LensCoat for the lens, hood and extenders. Also I did get the LensCoat "Hoodie" to replace the clumsy Canon lens "cap".

I took few photos with the lens and it seems to be pretty sharp even with 2x. Also the weight was much more than I anticipated. With 40D (no vertical grip) the lens wasn't very good combo, however with 1D it will be much better. Can't wait for the weekend to take some Enduro or Rallysprint photos....

2008-06-01 SRC Rallicross Hämeenlinna finals and Touko-Trial 2008 photos added

Rest of the Hämeenlinna SRC photos added:
- SRC Rallicross Hämeenlinna 2008 - Finals (20 photos)

In addition also photos from Touko-Trial 2008 (4 photos) which was driven in Forssa at Vatikallio.

2008-05-28 SRC Rallicross Hämeenlinna photos added - Part 1 and 2

Photos from SRC Rallicross SM Ahvenisto 2008 have been added to picturebank. There are two sets of photos:
- SRC Rallicross Hämeenlinna 2008 - Free practice (13 photos)
- SRC Rallicross Hämeenlinna 2008 - Qualification (20 photos)

Later when I have processed photos from finals they will be also added.

2008-05-21 Photos from last weekend events added and sports photography thoughts

I have now added photos from following events:
- 23 photos from 43. Toukokuunajo (Saturday May 17th)
- 25 photos from Pakkauspojat SM-rallisprint 2008 (Sunday May 18th)

As I expected Sunday's event was arranged VERY professionally. Also there were a lot of spectators, considering it was raining and very cold. If you look through my photos you may wonder why almost all the photos are taken from "not top 10 cars" - there is a reason for that: I personally find those japanese 4 wheel rally cars EXTREME BORING to watch and also photos are pretty boring too unless you happen to be there when there is an accident. Also I think that race cars should look nice and exotic - here is picture of the winner's car - honestly if somebody can claim this car is interesting...well then we have difference in opinion...pure white ordinary japanese car, not much commercial, no colors:

If you take a look at the results you can see them are also pretty boring, 7 fastest cars are Mitsubishi Lancers... Personally I'm not big Toyota (or any japanese car manufacturer) fan but I have to admit that Special Saloon Toyota Starlets are pretty funny to watch them to race.

What comes to photography lessons during weekend, I did learn few things:

1. Shutter speed for action photos
1.1. for cars 1/500 is enough to stop motion (of course on high speeds panning or higher shutter speed is required)...
1.2. ...for motorcycles 1/500 is on the edge - this is due to larger magnification and short distance from camera to subject, next time I try 1/800 for enduro

2. Autofocus
2.1 I had more mistakes by pre-focusing and trying to trigger the shutter when subject was on spot where I had prefocus adjusted ==> Use servo tracking instead of prefocusing
2.2 Adjust focus point so that the subject is placed to frame so that it will be well composed, will fit to frame and autofocus point has good contrast to focus onto
2.3 If motorcycle has lights on never focus to front number plate - it seems that will skrew the autofocus very easily
3. Composition / framing
3.1 I have tendency to take 3-8 photos of subject while it passes by. Typically the ones taken further distance will never be selected to group of pictures I publish or print ==> don't take frames where subject is too small and too far away - memory cards space is wasted too easily to these
3.2 Don't stop shooting even subject doesn't entirely fit to picture - results can be good even some parts of the subject are cropped out from the picture ( example )

For digital darkroom work shooting sport events puts enormous pressure, below is table of number of pictures in each phase I had:

Naturally it helps to have software which is workflow oriented and covering most of the needs (=you rarely have use PhotoShop - for these 2692 photos I did not have to open PhotoShop at all, Aperture was able to do all adjustments I needed). Below is explained my digital darkroom workflow for sport event photos:
1. Import photos to Apple Aperture, set basic metadata [city, country, keywords, rank=3 stars] (5 mins)
2. Stack photos (can be automated, typically not much manual adjustment required) so that all photos of same competitor on same round are on one stack (15min)
3. For each stack pick best photo, set it the stack "pick" (25min)
4. Close all stacks - now you see every competitor once per round (assuming you have taken photo of them all and not deleted on camera) (1min)
5. In fullscreen mode go through all photos and add competitors number to caption field [put cursor to caption field, write number, change photo with APPLE+right arrow, repeat] (10min)
6. Rank photos by going through them in full screen - use 4 stars if photo is one you might consider publishing - 2 starts if not interesting - 1 star if technical failure [each has to create their own ranking system - this is mine] (20min)
7. Now you have still too many photos - go through them in browser and avoid repetition, for example if you have too many pics from same curve, downgrade some of the images to 3 stars (as you see I don't have any bias based on how successful the competitor was) (5min)
8. Now you should have proper number of photos to publish (I consider 25 as a good number) - if you have too manu - just figure out which you least one to publish - if you don't have enough then I take a look at the results, if I don't have the best there I check how photos of them look like and consider adding them etc. (0-5min)
9. Adjust all the photos so that they look even on lightness, color balance, saturation, etc. Also if there is bad contrast due to for example dusty conditions adjust blackpoint accordingly - finally check black and white clipping and adjust accordingly (30min)
10. Add to each 4 star photo caption: Name of competitor, Vehicle, Which sports club she/he represents, Class in which competitor raced (5min)
11. Export photos on web size and sRGB. Then load to website and add to picturebank [my picturebank reads from EXIF data the saved caption and uses that as picture text in the picture bank - typically I only have to manually select category for each photo] (10min)

So whole process takes about 2 hours for event of this size. Before Apple Aperture same thing would have taken easily few days.

2008-05-17 Sport photographing experience with 1D Mk III

I was today photographing enduro race in Orimattila called 43. Toukokuunajo (in English 43th May race or something like that). Enduro was very interesting to see and photograph. However it seems to be trend that people arranging motorsport races don't want spectators to come to their races - that is my experience based on Ikaalisten Kylpylä Rallisprint and this enduro race. There were few common factors:
- webpages for both were almost useless
- both races did have few/one A4 paper to sell (in rallisprint it was given when 10€ fee was paid - in enduro it was said to have cost of 1€ but they want to sell coffee in order to give the paper to spectator) - the A4(s) contained only whom are in the race and rallisprint A4s also few extra lines about organization, schedule and commercials.... however the point was that neither of them didn't contain the map of race, which would have been very helpful in both cases.

More or less I got a feeling "insiders only" from both events.

However tomorrow's event where I plant to assuming it's not raining and I feel like it (today was quite rough day - to be outside whole day for a person who spends considerably long time on normal working week on office and indoors...) has a completely different approach. They have nice web page and even PDF which has instructions for spectators, map of race etc. How difficult it can be to do this kind of things professionally?

Back to subject... What I intended to write here was to tell about my experience of shooting sports with Canon EOS 1D Mark III. My settings for today's shooting were:
1. Tv mode - mostly set to 1/500s to freeze motion
2. Custom function 1.13 "Set aperture value range" so that I allowed apertures from "1 stop down" (for example for f/2.0 lens f/2.8 as minimum) to f/11
3. Base ISO set to 100, but Custom function 1.8 "Safety shift" to value "2:Enable (ISO speed)
Due to these settings I was all the time shooting at maximum image quality (Canon lenses are not perfect wide open and autofocus errors are more pronounced wide open) since the lenses were stopped down at least one stop. If my set minimum aperture and shutter speed I used did not allow proper exposure camera adjusted automatically ISO value. This was very excellent way of shooting sports - I could never have taken same photos for example with 20D or 40D.

Also autofocus mostly worked fine but I had to adjust the custom function 3.2 "AI Servo tracking sensivity" from 0 to +2 since I had first problems to track subjects. After setting this there were only few problems, mostly caused by me not being able to hold the selected autofocus point over an part of subject which had sufficient contrast. With the new firmware came the possibility to select focus points with multicontroller - this saved the day!!! I was many times in a position where I could photograph two paths from same position and naturally composition I wanted for two paths were different almost all the time and due to that I had to change the autofocus point all the time. Also I was very happy to found out that even 200mm + 1.4x was able to track motorcycle racing towards you +60km/h at 10 frames per second. People have claimed that the autofocus is not very good when using extenders but it starts to look like that only applies to crappy zooms like 70-200/2.8.

Overall I would say that combination of Canon EOS 1D Mark III and few fast primes (Canon EF135mm f/2L USM, Canon EF200mm f/2.8L USM and Canon EF 1.4x II) was a joy to use for sports photography. Naturally they should be good - they are the best equipment Canon has to offer (well Canon EF200mm f/2.0L IS USM would be nice upgrade but the +5k€ price tag kind of holds me back...I doubt many private persons buy this lens if the price is kept so high).

One of the problems in shooting sports is that something is happening all the time. In this enduro race every minute from 10:01 to 12:01 there were two drivers sent to the route. There were 3 off-road racing stages, and all drivers except class C drivers did drive them twice. I was on the 3rd/6th stage. There was constant action from 11:40 to 15:30. I did not have time to remove many photos in camera (only 40). This far my "darkroom policy" has been that I don't remove any photos but I may have to reconsider now when I shoot motorsports. The result from today's shooting was: 1101 photos, 13.09GB!!!! This amount of photos will cause problem even Apple Aperture has extreme efficient workflow. I quickly did browse thru photos and 78 of them I marked as unusable (majority because I failed to press trigger at time when motorcycle was on my pre-focused spot, some due to autofocus tracking problems and few due to composition). So this leaves me 1023 images which are technically OK.

Will be one damn long night to pick about 20 images to present in the picturebank. I'll add later the photos to picturebank, hopefully during next week. One problem with these that the web presentation of the photos aren't so great since most of the photos are vertical and picture size will be pretty small, since I want the photos to be size which can fit to one screen without scrolling.

2008-05-03 37 photos added to picturebank

April was busy month and didn't have time neither to photograph or process photos in digital darkroom. Finally I had some time to spend with computer so there are 37 new photos in the picturebank.

I found a new photographic location at end of March from Nokia: Salminvuori. There are also some paths, which I plan to visit later this year called "Salminkierros" at Mouhijärvi.

Then I did photograph a complete new subject to me: Rallisprint (a form of rally race where there is only one stage). It was quite fun to do and I definitely extend photography to other motor sports as well.

On this week I had my summer holiday week #4 from 2007. I did travel to Turun Saaristo, but to my supprice the place wan't as nice as I remembered, maybe it's because I haven't been there since 1980's... Photographically the place was huge disappointment, however I did like Lenholm nature park at Parainen, few pics from there added to picturebank.

And finally today I visited Vehoniemenharju and did walk the east side of it (Uhkainlampi is on that side). There were few nice flowers.

All new photos can be found from my picturebank at 2008 gallery.

Older news can be found from News page