p.1 #2 · Clarenville Dragway (Newfoundland) July 26 & 27th
Man that's a scary looking track to take photos at - no guard rails on either side but obviously you can get back as far as you want to pan with the cars. Looks like an 1/8th mile with an uphill shut off area and again no guard rails at the other end. The Powell racing chute shot (the yellow sedan) is a bit soft but there is another from the other side that is sharper.
Nice to see some photography from the artic circle.
p.1 #3 · Clarenville Dragway (Newfoundland) July 26 & 27th
Thanks for your comments Jon.
The Clarenville Dragway is a 1/4 mile strip that runs every other weekend during the summer and early fall. It uses a 3,900 foot long, 75 foot wide, operational airstrip (C-CZ3) that is closed to all but emergency traffic during the weekend Meets. If there is an emergency, there's a mad dash by everyone to remove the cones and timing devices so that the aircraft can land. It happened once during the meet that I photographed (for a Medivac flight). You can easily see the track in Google Earth. The start line is at these coordinates: 48.27221N 53.92981W (WGS84). I guess to an Australian we seem like the arctic circle but the track is actually not as far north as you might think. It's 32 miles further south than Bellingham, WA, in the U.S. The racing chute shot is soft because I had to be so far away. For that shot, I was 0.5 Km down the track from the finish line and about 0.3 Km from the car's location. My longest lens is a Canon 300 f/2.8 IS so I had stacked a 1.4x TC and a 2x TC for that shot. This alone makes for a soft image and then the heat off the track was causing lots of waves in the atmosphere, so that didn't help. On the other hand, I figured a soft shot of the chutes was better than no shot of the chutes.
p.1 #6 · Clarenville Dragway (Newfoundland) July 26 & 27th
Mardon Erbland wrote:
And they go FAST too. That run was 9.7 seconds for the quarter mile, hitting 137 mph at the finish.
And even faster on snow! Well, not actually, but my friend has a few that go 240 kms or so, on snow. Fun, fun times, considering there's a stretch about 4 kms long, that's pretty even, and straight!
