Saturday night at the Bridgeport Speedway Dirt track
By Alan Reinhart
1 Sep 2008
I'd never been to a dirt-track auto race, and when my friend Dave invited me to go I jumped at the chance. Also a great opportunity to give the D80's high-iso settings a workout as the race was in the evening.
I'd planned to crank up the ISO to 3200, but missed the setting and was shooting 'only' at 2500. Lots of noise in the dark areas, but, as I've mentioned before - there is simply no other way to get pix like this. And the noise-reduction in Lightroom cleans things up to where the noise isn't that much of an issue.
There was even an opportunity to try out the panning feature of the VR lens. The Number 14 car was a real grab-pan shot - he was coming out of the turn, pedal down hard and all I could do was whip the camera along and try to sync with him. Tried a number of passes - this was the only one that made it. With a bit more practice it could be a useful technique. VR def rocks!
High ISO - VR lens - get out into the night and find a whole new world of photo ops.
