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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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News

2009-05-10 Early spring photos

Excuse for not posting anything for a month this time is that I didn't take much photos, and had again business travel to Brazil and USA. I went few times photographing, but mainly it was testing of trekking gear and scouting for good locations for summer, the nature in April is still gray/brown/dead. Link to all 24 added photos, below links at end of chapters open subset of these photos.

Eräpyhä

Eräpyhä is "mountain" and area for trekking etc. I visited the nature conservation area, which is at Orivesi's part of the whole area. The area was nice, a lots of cliffs and old forest. However I would not go there to photograph landscapes - even from the highest point the landscape could not be seen because forest was blocking the view, small blocks of the nice lake landscape could be seen, but not photographed. Link to 5 photos from Eräpyhä.





Siikaneva

Siikaneva is nature reservation area for swamps. I visited there at 2nd weekend of April and it proven to be very good test for my new tent and sleeping bag. During the day it was +10C or so, but at when the sun set it was generally around -2C. Unluckily the night I was camping in Siikaneva proven to be extra cold, it was -8C (hard to say since the thermometer there was didn't have very accurate scale). My sleeping bag had -5C the lowest "comfortable" temperature and it seems it's accurate rating since it was a bit chilly with normal underwear. On 2nd day everything inside tent was wet, including camera and I didn't want to risk and just put it to bag and did let it try 2 days at home before opening the camera bag. So no photos on 2nd day... Link to 4 photos from Siikaneva.

Liesjärvi

Liesjärvi is national park, which most interesting feature is narrow ridge (Kyynärharju), which separates two lakes from each another. In addition to that there is plenty of old forest near Korteniemi. The camping place at Savilahti is in very nice location, just by the lake. Again I got disappointed to the advertised viewpoint in Hyypiökallio and other other viewpoint.

Between 1st May and 3rd May I actually made two separate visits to the national park. On 1st I went there with tent and other needed gear for overnight stay at wilderness and quite soon find out that trying to carry photo equipment and needed trekking gear requires quite good fitness... bag weight was 31kg and I was very exhausted carrying it. On the second time I went to Liesjärvi, I just took photo equipment and cooking stuff and bag weighted about 21kg and it was much easier to carry. Link to 15 photos from Liesjärvi.

I decided to photo some birds to fullfil "expectations" (every 2nd person in forest asks "have you seen any birds / any good bird photos / etc." when you carry a camera in forest, which personally makes me pist off like there would not be anything else to photograph - personally I could not care less about birds). I had 300mm lens and 2x extender so I had 600mm lens, and even still most of the photos had the bird less than 1/10th of the image width. The included photos are not cropped, except the one with large dark gray birds from which I cropped the top and bottom off since they did not add any value from composition point of view or didn't contain any additional information.

2009-04-04 Photos from Brazil and India

At end of January I was travelling for work to Brazil and India. I had some time to take some tourist photos as well. 29 photos from January added to picturebank.

2009-03-24 Nine photos from last weekend

Spring is coming, at least if weather keeps as sunny as in weekend we get rid off the snow pretty soon. 9 photos from last weekend added to picturebank.

Since I purchased Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* 3.4/35-70 and Leica Vario-Elmar-R 80-200mm f/4 I have been photographing a lot with zoom lenses. I was first afraid that this would affect negatively to my photos, since zoom lenses tend to make photography "too fast" and photographers typically don't consider enough composition and perspective, just stand in one place and zoom back and forth without moving. Photographing only with primes for last five years has teached me something and I was able to manage perspective and compositions pretty well. But afterwards looking the photos, on some locations I did see my own tendency to shoot around without thinking too much.

This year I will be carrying a lot lighter kit with me while travelling or hiking. I plan just to have these two mentioned zoom lenses and wide prime (either Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 2.8/25 or 2.8/28) and one or two "special" primes, which would be for example Carl Zeiss Makro-Planar T* 2/100 (narrow depth of field and/or macro capability). Also camera is lighter Canon EOS 5DmkII instead of the Canon EOS 1DmkIII.

2009-03-15 Four pictures from Lempäälä

4 photos from Lempäälä added to picturebank.

2009-03-14 8 pictures from Kangasala

Wow, what a day; 6 hours outdoor activity instead sitting in the office! 8 photos from Kangasala added to picturebank.

2009-03-12 Few old stuff and winter pictures added

Have been quite busy times at work and lots of travel, so not so much updated in here. I did buy some new lenses from USA since it seems that used camera market (eBay, KEH etc.) is having very low prices now. I did buy a little more lenses than I planned since there wasn't clear opinion is Carl Zeiss Tele-Tessar T* 3.5/200 good lens or not, so I decided to find it out by myself. Other lenses were mainly Zeiss and I did buy also Leica Vario-Elmar-R 80-200mm f/4 which turned out to be one of the finest lenses between 120mm and 200mm.

While testing the new lenses I shoot few photos, old dirty/rusty stuff from a place near my parents and some winter nature images. Photos can be seen here.

2009-02-08 Washington pictures

Instead of the Brazil/India photos I decided to publish some last October photos from USA. Here is link to 17 photos from Washington and one from Ocean City, MD, where we had training/workshop week with people from work.

While I loaded photos from Brazil/India to Apple Aperture I noticed that the RAW images are still not supported by Apple OS X, and therefore also not by Apple Aperture. I assumed that the support would have been added, but it seems it's never coming. Therefore alternative workflow is needed for Panasonix LX-3 pictures. This was the main reason why I didn't post the Brazil/India images. Have to figure some good way since the Silkypix software, which was delivered with LX-3 is really awful. Maybe I load the JPG images and then rate them and add metadata in Apple Aperture and then process just the good ones (which will be printed or published) with the awful Silkypix.

2009-02-01 Back at home 6 flights, 10 fly meals and about 35000 kilometers later

Due to unfortunate coincidence of my work schedules I had to visit Brazil and India at consecutive weeks. Visiting both of our offices was nice, but personally I would have preferred to stay at least one week at home in between, which could have lead four lost weekends instead of three. My flight itinery become really weird and long: Helsinki - Frankfurt - Sao Paulo * Sao Paulo - Frankfurt - New Delhi * New Delhi - Munich - Helsinki.

Luckily I had some free time as well while travelling, otherwise this trip would have been very hard since three weekends were more or less lost while travelling. In Brazil I spent my free time in Sao Paulo and in India I visited the Tai Mahal. Specially the 2nd weekend was rough; flight left Sao Paulo at 7PM Brazilian time, whole Sunday I was in air except 3.5 hour wait at Frankfurt, finally I arrived to hotel in Delhi at 3AM (Monday) Indian time and we had to start driving to Tai Mahal at 6AM...

I had my point-and-shoot camera (Panasonic LX-3) with me so Within few days I will publish some photos from the trip.

2009-01-16 First infrared photos

I had first opportunity to use my Hoya R72 infrared filter at lunch break at Wednesday. I was surprised about few things:
- live view was completely black, had to compose without filter and focus by "feeling"
- shutter speeds were much longer than I anticipated
- hot spot is faintly visible with Canon 50/1.4 and 28/1.4 already at f/2.8, and really annoying at f/5.6, hope Zeiss and Leica lenses aren't as bad

Based on this I assume 1D mkIII has very efficient filtering for infrared. I have to experience more later, preferably when sun is actually shining. Also one point of taking infrared photos is to have leaves in trees.

First infrared photos can be found from here. These are taken at pretty high ISOs and I don't yet master this technique, so don't expect great artictical experience...

2009-01-15 Hallila Herkkuenduro 2008 photos added

I finally processed Hallila Herkkuenduro photos from June 2008.

2009-01-12 Few winter sceneries and wireless flash triggers

During weekend I was photographing at Mouhijärvi (Otamus) and Lempäälä (Höytämö). For change light was quite decent. See the photos at here.

During weekend I was photographing at Mouhijärvi (Otamus) and Lempäälä (Höytämö). For change light was quite decent. See the photos at here.

Finally I received wireless flash triggers. I did get the cheap ones, transmitter is RF-04 and receiver is PT-04. I shortly tested with the batteries they come with, which are supposed to be "test only". Based on the testing they were working pretty well, not perfect but pretty well. I got few misfires but based on my testing I could not generate systematic situation to cause misfire. However set of one transmitter and three receivers is half the price of one Pocket Wizard. While I don't photograph professionally I think I'm fine with these cheap triggers.

2009-01-05 New adapters

I decided to change all my adapters to "happypagehk" adapters. Now my most used lenses have EXIF chip which is coded according to lens focal length and maximum aperture. I did take some photos with adapters and they seem to be working very well. When there was EXIF chip in the adapter it seems that exposure is metered more accurately.

Happypage adapters seem to be perfect in every way:
- right thickness; now my Leicas focus to infinity and Contax past infinity (I adjusted it to be used with too thick adapter)
- all (I did buy one C/Y, 2 Leica R and 2 Nikon F adapters) do have stop skrew
- side visible to mirror box is anodized to black
- mechanically better than any of my previous adapters

Adapters got to Finland pretty fast, specially considering that each adapter's chip had to be flashed to lens specific values. I made the order at 4PM GMT +2 31st December 2008 and got the adapters this morning (5th Jan - New Year and weekend in between). Packaging was pretty good as can be seen in photo below and each adapter included lens back cap.
Here is larger version of the image below.

2008-12-29 Few winter photos from Eura

While enjoying my summer holiday days :-) on snowless pitch black Finland I took few photos from Eura. Link to 9 photos from 25th December.

While still enjoying my summer holiday I went to see if there would be some snow in Tampere forests and I got positively surpriced - there was some snow and specially at edge of forest there was nice subjects for some winter photography. See 7 photos added today to picturebank.

2008-12-04 Norway 4th day photos added

Link to 13 photos from 4th day on my Norway 2008 holiday.

As you can see from photo I'm not very used to use ultra wide angle lenses, 17mm was
slightly wider than I expected and this panorama ended up also to be self portrait ;-)

2008-11-30 Panasonic LX-3 first pictures

Due to travelling quite a lot "1 week trips" I have not been photographing much lately while travelling. Somehow it's too big effort and risk to bring DSLR plus lenses to work location where you may not have any opportunity to photograph. I decided to to buy pocket size camera. I ended up selecting Panasonic LX-3 based on reviews and forum discussions. Link to first photos from LX-3. I'll add later article about LX-3.

2008-11-29 Nokian Lämpövoimalaitos

Link to this photo. Also 1920 pixel wide version available here .

2008-11-28 Two pictures about Helsingin Tuomiokirkko

Link to these two photos.

2008-11-24 Few Tampere panoramic photos

Lately I have been taking quite a lot of panorama pictures around Tampere. Pictures are taken on different days but four of the pictures have Naistenlahti as subject of the photo. Link to photos added to picturebank.

Also included my first try to create "gigapixel" image, which resulted 0.376 gigapixel (376 megapixels, where typical camera has 10 megapixels). It's slightly problematic to display such large picture in internet, here is link to 25% version of this photo, don't crash your computer it's 8100 pixels wide...it's also in the picture bank as normal size photo.

2008-11-21 Photos from my father's workshop

Last time I visited my parents I took some photos from my father's workshop. Link to photos.

   

2008-11-03 Few photos added

6 photos added: Link. Photos are from some shootouts I did during this fall.

 

2008-10-26 Night time colors

9 photos added: Link. Been pretty busy so it was good that in last news I didn't define in which weekend I will publish these ;-)

 

2008-09-31 Norway 3rd day photos added

15 photos added: Link. "Night time colors" should be ready to be published at weekend.

   

2008-09-29 Few fall colors photos added

Three photos added: Link. Also I have under work (just needs to write the metadata to picturebank) Norway 3rd day photos and "Night time colors" series.

2008-09-16 Last weekend band photos and HDR explanation

Last weekend I was photographing something completely different; Seamus was performing at Loimaa. In addition they also filmed their next music video, for which I had the opportunity to take still shots. Few photos added to picturebank; 12 pictures. Interesting experience to take part of this kind of project, makes me wish I would have more free time...

Many people have been asked what are these HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos and how they are made. HDR is needed in order to capture scenery with high contrast with camera since camera can capture much narrower dynamic range what eye can see. HDR programs use multiple photos of one subject shot by different exposure. This is done by varying shutter speed while keeping aperture constant. Then these photos are used as input material for HDR program, which calculates combination exposure of these photos according to parameters given for program.

Here is explanation how this photo has been made:
1. I took 5 photos by using bracketing feature of my camera. Aperture was set to f/11 but these photos had different exposure as you can see from picture above. This was done by using shutter speeds 1/800s, 1/250s, 1/80s, 1/25s and 1/8s. Naturally tripod was used as well as cable release.
2. With computer I converted raw images to 16-bit TIFFs after adjusting white balance to same on all five photos.
3. Then photos were imported to Photomatix Pro and photos merged to one.
4. After that resulted 32-bit HDR image was converted back to 16-bit TIFF by using tone mapping after optimizing tone mapping settings for this photo.

There are more photos coming from Norway summer holiday, maybe few photos this month, but for sure on October. Here is link first photo I processed from the 3rd day of Norway holiday. In addition to being HDR it's also panorama (3 vertical images combined to one image) - this generates a little too much work on post processing, even results are pretty nice and image technically is so big and good quality that it can be printed to enormous size. I have many other other HDR+panorama pictures taken in the 3rd day of the holiday, hope they won't take as long to process as this one, since this one took 5 hours, of which main part was inventing workflow to do HDR+panorama images.

2008-09-07 First Norway holiday photos added

Finally found time to start processing Norway summer holiday photos. First day was 110% driving, no photos. On second day I drove from Oslo to west through Rogaland. Weather was awful on photography point of view, raining all the time and very foggy as well. Therefore majority of photos I took on 2nd day are taken by using HDR (High Dynamic Range). In this method multiple bracketed exposures are taken and then specific computer program is used to extract the dynamic range of multiple photos to one photo.

I have also written separate article about whole Norway trip. My goal is to finalize that article day by day, in same rhythm as photos are added to Picturebank. At this point the article is just sceleton since I have the working draft on my work laptop, which was left to office for this weekend.

Link to Norway 2nd day photos: 10 pictures

In addition to those photos I realized that I have not mentioned here of other photos added to Picturebank earlier:
- Few photos while travelling from Tampere to Eura and few flower photos from Eura
- Säkylän harjukierros
- Northern Satakunta

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.

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