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This year the WRC (World Rally Championship) came back to New Zealand and there was a super special stage held at the Auckland Domain. This 1.5km route starting point was right outside the Auckland Museum front door and goes around half of the domain. This Auckland Domain route was actually used twice. First was on Thursday morning's "shakedown" for the drivers to test their cars. Then the super special stage that happened on Friday evening.

I went to both days with my Nikon D700. While i used to go to a lot of car racing, drifting events and taking photos for various magazines or other purposes, I have stopped going to any race tracks or car events since my daughter was borned. Because of that, this is actually the first time i use my D700 to take some car action photos! I was quite excited to see how my D700 performs compares to my good old D200.

The shakedown started at 9:30am and finished at 1pm. Unfortunately i didn't arrive there until noon so it means i only had less than an hour to look around and also take some photos. Since I'm not shooting for any magazines this time I don't have a media pass. It means I can't just go to anywhere i want and I can only take photos from the normal spectator areas. Unfortunately most of the spectator areas are either not the best angle for taking pictures or just too far for my 70-200mm lens. In the end I still managed to find a few reasonably good spots (well within the spectator areas) and took some photos from those spots.

I have to say my D700's first day at a "track" was a very positive experience. The 51 point autofocus system performed very well, it was fast, accurate and tracked the cars very well. The 8fps also makes capturing the action so much easier. The only thing i miss is the longer reach i got with my old D200 (as it has 1.5x crop factor) but oh well in return i got much better high ISO performance which should help me capturing the night time super special stage on the following day. At least that's what i thought at that time...

So anyway, here are a few photos from the shakedown. I hope you like them. The photos from the Friday evening SSS will be coming soon.

for more photos, please visit my blog: http://www.photobyrichard.com/photobyrichard/?p=158

Friday - Auckland Domain Evening SSS (Super Special Stage)

This is a video from this SSS:

If the difficulty for taking some good photos on Thursday’s shakedown was 4/10, the difficulty for taking good photo on Friday night must be at least 9.9/10!!!


I can write a 2000 words essay to explain the problems i had that night, but to keep it short, there were way too many people, the super bright headlight from the car blinded me completely but the route/car itself was way too dark (test shot says i need to shot at 1/60s f/2.8 and ISO12800) which means not only i have to use very high ISO and the autofocus system was not working most efficiently. Unfortunately i have to shoot at f/2.8 or near so the focus has almost no room for error. And since i was using ISO12800 + f/2.8, the exposure is very sensitive to any light and the flash from all the other spectators makes the exposure completely unpredictable. I only have approx 2 second interval to shoot each car. The list can go on and on..

So anyway, here are the photos i took from Friday evening, to be honest, I’m not really happy at all but I know a lot of you are waiting for the photos, so here you are.

p.s. A lot of pictures were took at ISO 6400-12800 or higher so apologise for the noisy and poor picture quality.

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More photos on my blog:
http://www.photobyrichard.com/photobyrichard/?p=212

I like the post processing on the photos at the end!!

Nice shots there, what kind of shutter speed were you shooting at for the cars??

SOme of those cars were going sideways on that tiny little road!!! damn!!!

added a few friday night photos..


race photos coming soon!

Some nice captures.
Did you see Raikkonen?

Nice processing, i like !!!!!

okay now added race pictures from the evening SSS !

That evo bent the rear wheel? Damn..

Some of the night shots got a little noisier, what ISO were you shooting at??

Arcspace: no didn't see Raikkonen

CTM: yeah that evo turned into a rear wheel steer EVO !! re ISO, you don't read what i write do you?