If you've never been to a Word Rally Championship event before it's important to know that before the cars come through the stage there's several safety vehicles that pass through to make sure the stage is safe for the competitors and spectators. Vehicles includes pickups, rally cars and helicopters all travelling at increased speeds. In the past WRC organisers used to number the cars 000, 00 and 0 to indicate that the cars are coming, now this is gone so you need to be ready and set-up for the sudden arrival of reigning world champion Sebastien Loeb arriving in the Citroen at full speed - no practice passes to get your eye / aim / settings sorted. For the morning stage Kakaristo 1 [SS16] I took a position just past the inside of a 90 degree left.
Kakaristo 1 [SS16]
As described before it's not all simple stuff this rally photography, and I was poorly prepared for the arrival of Sebastien Loeb. ISO was too low and the AF mode was still set to One shot meaning that the metering had locked when the AF locked not when the picture was taken. Quickly I addressed the settings but with only a few minutes between cars you have to wait for the dust to fall, then make the changes. You can also see that there was one of the famous Finnish trees in the middle of my frame - I needed to change my shooting position a little too.My settings:
I was using the EOS-1D Mark III and EF24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens since it was wide enough to allow me to get the cars in the frame even when they pass only a few metres in front of me. Focus was set to AI Servo, single point AF - usually the center, AF point expansion was turned on for all surrounding 6 points. I used a mix of Av and manual exposure modes - mostly Av. ISO speeds were quite high at ISO 400 or more since being under the trees it was quite dark and with the cars really motoring past quite close to me a high shutter speed was needed even though I was panning with the cars. I also set my Picture Styles to Standard with +2 saturation and +4 sharpening even though I was shooting RAW since this gives nice saturated colours on the cars.
Of the leading cars only Henning Solberg in the Ford missed the junction and had to quickly spin the car round and then make the right hand turn to proceed. This also shows the amount of dust that is typical of dry weather rally Finland stages. You can also see why manual exposure wasn't the answer too; the range of brightness from the junction in full sunlight to the shade under the trees was simply too much for a 1 exposure setting fits all approach.So with my brain in gear, the camera settings sorted I could concentrate on panning with 100kmh+ cars passing meters in front of me with trees framing them. Sometimes it works sometimes not, but take plenty of pictures since digital film is free and the drivers won't come back to do it again if you miss.
I wasn't happy with my success rates for sharp pictures so upped the ISO to 640 for this shot of Toni Gardemeister in the Suzuki SX4 for a sharper result. I'd reasoned that the cars were not only moving forward but up and down on the surface and I've not mastered the art of panning in two perpendicularly opposed directions at the same time on one picture.
At this point I was thinking time for some different angles, so moved further along the stage to some more open road where the trees would not shade the cars so much. ISO could go down, shutter speed up and the panning could be done with less concern for trees in the way.By now lunch was calling so time to eat and wait around in the sunshine for Kakaristo 2.
Kakaristo 2 [SS19]
This time I was taking no chances I even took sequences of the course cars coming through the stage to hone the settings. I ended up setting the AF Servo sensitivity to +1 making it more jumpy, but I would have plenty of time to pick up the car in the distance and track it as it comes to me.After seeing some of the top cars coming through the stage we started to walk along the stage toward the Kakaristo corner where the majority of the spectators were - it was also necessary to go this way to reach the car park. Here we could see the special rally dust on the crowd who'd been standing there all day. Everyone was a uniform shade of grey regardless of the colour of their shirts - it resembled the grey colour of the road too!
Most rally fans are characters, but a few take this to new heights in there 'optimised rally outfits'. For our small group of rally fans it was time for traffic - the queues out of the stage were some of the worst we'd seen in many years. Of course there's many more photos but i'm sure you can see rally cars all over the internet. I'll put some more in my flickr photostream in the coming weeks.
- p4pictures -
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