If you are a motorcycle lover like myself, enjoy these

(Smaller sizes upon request by the nice FM members ):

Wow. Nice colors. Well done!

Thanks MagicNikon - I enjoyed your work as well. I have been passing your 16-85VR test shots around...love them all

Nice work General.
I like your panning work.
Care to share the camera settings? Like SS and Ap. settings?

No problem!

I use to be a canon shooter, until I found my new home with Nikon ;-)

Primo 300mm F2.8 VR
Tv @ [1/160 - 1/320 seconds]
ISO 200 locked

The lens is effective 450mm. I have used the 1.4x TC as well bringing it just a bit over 620mm+. Overcast clouds for the past 3 days of shooting and aperture sometimes opened up to F/4.0.

Due to the distance of the bikes and my position (of course safely behind k-line blocks), your background can still be blurred pretty smoothly even at large F-STOP apertures.

These were done with a D300, NEF format. AF tracking using 9-point continuous servo mode. Of course, 8fps has it's benefits. My keeper rate is about 70% or so.

Previous batches I've shot (of other events) - a total of 40GB were thrown away - due to the stupid AF ACTIVE MODE turned on - causing some weird double blurr when hand held. It takes some getting use to hand holding the 300mm F/2.8 VR. You need shoulder muscles and alot of patience. ;-)

A tip: I would definitely bring the following:

* 70-200mm F2.8 VR

* 300mm F2.8 VR or even the 300mm F4 is fine if you have steady hands and don't mind faster shutter speeds for motion capture

* 400mm F2.8 VR (you can hand hold for 2 minutes tops...lol) - bring a 30lb tripod + panning head if you want at least 50% keeper pictures ;-)

* 1.4x TC. I would use this sparingly. Some of the images may appear a bit soft but most likely due to the AF focusing on the D300. Most shots on a bright sunny day will make you stop down towards the F/7 - F11 range. Of course, you are free to interpret your own "style" of shooting - hence the shutter speeds are always up to you to decide. I'm good at shooting @1/160 without much blurr hand held. But even then I still need assistance with a bogen/manfrotto tripod and head.

Great shooting, thanks for sharing

everyone is welcome

I enjoy this forum much more so than that fxxking piece of shxt dpreview

At least we have shooters here and not gear heads who only care to clean their camera daily and minimize shutter clicks. Of course I'm not talking about you guys!

Fantastic shots, great description / how-to.

Thanks for sharing!

When you handhold the 300mm, do you keep VR on at all times?

^^ short answer: YES, I hand hold with VR ON:

Whenever you shoot high speed subjects with super tele-lens, you must make sure your shutter is fast enough to stop camera shake. However, you cannot have the shutter too fast or else you will stop motion. There is no wrong or right way - only your perspective on the subject captured, however, but there is the "typical" way which is to stop enough motion with just enough blur to create "fast movement blur".

The VR helps when you have shutter speeds under 1/400". You have to remember to wait a second for it to kick in (same as canon's) and then you have to stabilise yourself - just like how to shoot a rifle at long distance...breathing is critical too.

I don't know about others, but I find it quite hard to hand hold for long periods of time (the longest for me was about 3.5hours straight). You can almost bet hand holding a 400mm f/2.8 will get you tired instantly. It's not just hand holding the entire setup, it's also being able to hand hold AND track your subject - motorcycles move FAST - sometimes extremely fast and you almost have to anticipate their movements (which comes with trivial experience shooting more and more of it).

The trick is HIGH FPS. The camera is a tool and you can only expect so much from AUTO FOCUS. You basically try to track and pan with your bike and hope the AF gets you that one shot you are shooting for. If you can get ONE decent frame from that entire HI-FPS range, you're money.

I recommend a hefty tripod/head system. If mobility and quick action is your taste, then perhaps a monopod....or a big workout at the gym but even then, you will tire out and your shots will look terrible near end of day due to fatigue.

Happy shooting!
---The General

Outstanding shots, and cool lens

Cool bike shots. I wish a lot more folks did them. The variety helps broaden the different styles of images we all get.

Great series, very crisp

I'd love to look at them, but you are eating up my laptop. Pictures are way too big to look at.

Please only post 10, 800px on the long side images, PLEASE!

I didn't want to even look at your shots because it was taking too much time to load and I have a very new, clean MacBook that never has issues.....

SMALLER SIZES, PLEASE!!

thank you Jonathan...yes, way too many photos, especially when posting them twice. Link to larger images if you need to, but on my Mac Pro and broadband connection it took forever to load the large images....I also use my iPhone to check the site when I can and it took almost 30 minutes to load this page.... should only take a minute there....

Love the shots, and the colors are amazing!

I'm getting ready to bite the bullet and get the canon 300 2.8 IS, I'm excited, I think it's a great lens canon or nikon.

I have a friend who shoots nikon for ESPN, he said the nikon 300 2.8 was an awesome lens. As you've proved with magazine quality shots!

Carl Auer wrote:
thank you Jonathan...yes, way too many photos, especially when posting them twice. Link to larger images if you need to, but on my Mac Pro and broadband connection it took forever to load the large images....I also use my iPhone to check the site when I can and it took almost 30 minutes to load this page.... should only take a minute there....

Didn't even check on my iPhone....who knows how long it would have taken!

I was on a wireless University connection at full strength in the library....and it took about 5 minutes to load the page. Most posts with 10 photos will take about 15 seconds.

Totally kick-ass! Your shots are amazing, well done. I hope to be able to produce shots like you in the not-too-distant future..

James.

I'm slowly finding myself getting more and more absorbed into motorsports thanks to fantastic images such as these. The color and sharpness are sensational.

Me being a Canon guy the black Nikkor lens looks so hot I guess I'm suffering from lens envy as I am waiting and waiting for my 500mm to come.

Great shots General. Thanks for the tips, they were very helpful.

Rags