blogpost #100 :-)… Oh, and some really cool kart photos
I gotta get this game for my Wii 
They call it “Karting”… forget about your childhood go-kart with pedals, these things have engines, and not old scrap ones stolen from lawnmowers and bolted on by your drunken uncle, we’re talking motorbike size engines here, high quality stuff… read on to find out what I was doing there and to see some really cool images…
KARTING
We call him Ninja… why I honestly don’t know, but he has a knack for most sports.. I met him 10-12 years ago playing football, but we lost track… keeping in touch on Facebook I knew that he had started taking an interest in motor sports apparently kart racing at his local track “Barmosen” in Vordingborg…
Seeing that I wanted to spend some time with the kids, but desperately needed something to do, I contacted him to find out when he was going out racing again..
Two birds with one stone and all that. Kids a suckers for fast moving objects, and I have to admit it, so am I.
Thomas aka Ninja started racing four years ago (he’s the one driving kart #99 on the photos) and hasn’t looked back. He drives a kart with a 125cc Rotax engine he bought second hand… I wont tell you the price, ’cause I don’t know, but I can tell you that I could have traded over my camera bag for his kart and gear and I would be the one feeling robbed, money wise anyways… It’s that cheap a sport to get into.
These karts don’t have gears, so top speed and acceleration a determined by the number of teeth on the gears. On the day Thomas reaches 60 mph on the straight but had actually sacrificed some top speed to get more acceleration out of the corners by physically changing the gears on the kart.
Thomas has never raced for real, but should he decide to, I foresee a win in the near future. DASU who arranges these races has some more coming up so If you wanna go check ‘em out you can see the schedule on either www.sak-motorsport.dk or on http://www.gokartweb.dk/kalender.asp?id=15176.
DOWN TO BUSINESS
I brought most of my gear with me, my primary lens being the Canon EF 70-200mm L USM. I also had the Manfrotto 680B monopod with me but discarded it after an hour needing the ability to move freely more than the sterdiness of the monopod, which usually does help, even though the lens is light enough to handhold.
(Quick tip:
Loosening up the tripod collar on the lens and using the lens on a monopod gives you a steadier platform where you can alter the angle of horizon quickly. This also allows you to pan the camera comfortably without any jerky movements up and down.)
When shooting racing I primarily use shutterspeed priority, finding on more than one occasion that 1/60 to 1/125 of a second, is the perfect shutterspeed to get the motionblur in the background that I’m looking for.
The up close and personal shots were taken with the Canon EF-s 18-55mm IS lens… (Oh and some of those shots was actually taken by my kids, how cool is that 
…)
That day, the available light usually gave me an aperture of around f/7.1 at 100 ISO… when using shutterspeed priority I find that in order to get the images I want I need to set the EV compensation to about +2/3 of a stop to get them bright enough.
Getting low is also a parameter I’m working on getting better at, as this gives you a better sense of the speed of the vehicles.
I’ve chosen some of my favorite shots to show you in this post, but check out my portfolio for all 25 photos worthy of getting a spot there. Click on the link at the bottom of this post.
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/11 - 1/60
My 5 year old son took this photo 
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/10 - 1/60
EXIF: ISO 100 - f/7.1 - 1/80
Check out my portfolio with all 25 photos here…
http://azr-photography.com/?page_id=1810
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