M1 For Motorsports

SAAC 43 Sears Point, Sonoma, California

Too bad about the smoke from the fires

Hi Harvey,

love the last one with the wheel lift

Are they cropped much?

m1 is more than capable of motor sports eh!

My last outing was good, used 40-150 pro and it was prob 90% in focus keepers, only went completely off twice......however when I put the ec14 on oof shots increased drastically, to the point I will not use it again for motor racing.....should have put the 300 f4 on instead....maybe next time I will use 2 bodies...one with 300 one with 40-150

some damn nice cars too

A nicely done set Harvey. Great to see. I assume the car in the seventh and the last are the same car, five years apart. A lovely car and I like the 60s Corvette as well. I am assuming it was an original racer from that era given the window. I seem to recall seeing those back then but memory can be unreliable, mine now anyway.

Andrew

I didn't know a Mustang could do that except over radical dip with a turn in it like the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca.

A little hard to tell here, but that's the only one I posted that I shot with the 14-150 on a PL-7, the backup camera I brought with me. I hadn't shot this track before. I wish I had the EM1 and the 40-150PRO with the TC for that one, not that anybody will complain about it. On day one I wanted to walk everywhere with a superzoom to find all the best locations for the next two days. I didn't need to do that, but I did a lot of walking and the kit was lighter.

You can see from the shadow under the car the sun backlit the car slightly throwing a lot of glare on the white paint. I think the 40-150PRO would have managed it better. I can get by with the 14-150 but the 40-150PRO Is a far superior lens.

Over the last few years, I thought about a SONY or Nikon FF with a 70-200 for this, but looking at these images, what for? I showed them and the camera to a friend who shoots a Nikon 850 for this professionally. His eyes went wide. He couldn't believe how small and light the kit is. He's a big guy and he needs a monopod. Its difficult for him to walk the track as much as I do. Its a huge advantage to be where you need to be in comfort.

FF still has some advantages in aperture. I can tell when the image is made with a FF sensor by the DOF - or I haven't yet mastered the M43 system. I didn't push the lens wide open often enough to know. It wasn't what I was trying to do that weekend. For me, size and weight is the real advantage of the system. Maybe not as good for fine art photography. I wouldn't know. I don't know how those artists make the images they do. But for this, it doesn't leave me wanting for anything.

I had no problem acquiring focus with the 1.4XTC. I'm totally happy with it in this light, can't tell the difference in IQ if I used it or not by looking at the images. The difference is no more than a variation from composition to composition, not worth concern. I could not tell you without looking at the EXIF data in which photos I used it and which I didn't. Good enough for me. This is not like counting bird feathers.

I could have used the 300 f/4 if I had one, but I can find enough images to make with a maximum of 420mm of reach for this track. I need a lot more for a couple of places at Laguna Seca where I'd use 840mm, where even 600mm has to be cropped.

I'm not sure of the order because I can't see the photos from this page, but the resolution top to bottom for general purposes, to answer your question, is as follows:

3998 X 2575

2801 X 2110

1501 X 815

1626 X 1148

3069 X 2280

4052 X 2725

2174 X 1702

2358 X 1865

3308 X 2497

4087 X 2908

1448 X 899

2558 X 1665

To which I conclude super high resolution is overrated, at least for this kind of photography.

Even the cockpit shot of the Corvette driver, the deepest crop, has a respectable amount of sharpness and detail on a 27in 2000 line monitor. I wouldn't try to make a 20X30 of it, but it might make a nice 8X10. If you want to make a poster of it you probably need a 40MP camera to crop the image that much, but for an event like this one, I came back with enough good images to make the club members drool. How much better can it get?

I've found some of the M43 lenses, like the 40-150PRO and the 75, and OM lenses like the 135 f/2.8 are so sharp you can crop the images to something like the resolution you would make for a cell phone monitor and they still look detailed. I confess I don't understand this. From observations, It seems to me the correlation between camera image resolution and print/monitor size display is not linear. I have images cropped to 900X600 that are detailed displayed on a 2000 line, 27 inch monitor. I don't know why they are. The image has to be very, very sharp for this. That's all in the lens.

I posted a batch of these images on my website in 900X675 resolution. A magazine editor says he's drooling. He attended the event, is going to write an article on it if I don't. He will print some of these images. If he needs higher resolution to print bigger than a quarter page, I'll make those 1280X960. He never needs more resolution than that. He prints most photos 3X2 inches. How much resolution do you need for that? Club members are looking at them 900X675 and are perfectly happy. I'll migrate to 20MB someday. I'm in no hurry. The camera was set on "F", not "SF". I discovered that last night. I guess I have to try SF.

For this purpose, composition trumps IQ. Your comment proves it. You like the 3-Wheeling Mustang the best, the one in the bunch with IQ that is not up to the quality of the others. If you offer a 3-Wheeling Mustang with mediocre IQ, and a boring shot of a car on a straight in the highest IQ, an editor will take the lower quality IQ shot every time. This is all about the composition, capturing the action IMHO. It isn't fine art. Its motorsports.

The camera missed focus badly in less than 10 of the last 2,000 photos. Not every photo is "perfect" but a lot are close to it, and nearly all of them are usable. Sometimes the composition is so interesting, even mediocre IQ is good. You can get a photo that looks like a poorly focused MF film image taken in the 1960's and people like it because it presents the racing action. It looks like an old film camera image you scanned. They don't care if its perfectly focused and detailed, but we do..

Even that Corvette cockpit at less than 1500X900 looks good, won't win an IQ contest, but is a good image.

Since you asked.....

Look at the car numbers and you see they are different Mustangs. There were a lot of them out there.

The black Cobra is ugly IMHO. I posted it because its a good image.

This was the open track and vintage race event of the National Shelby American Automobile Club, held in a different city every year.

A lot of original race cars from the 60's have become so valuable in recent years, that many are no longer brought to these events. You have to know the individual car and its history to know if it is, or is not an original vintage race car with racing history. Its easy to make a clone.

It used to be hard to get a car in these events. It had to be an original race car from the 70's or older. Now they will accept anything to fill the grids and pay the track fees so they can have the event. The owners don't want to risk the cars like they did in the 1990s and some of them are aging out, getting too old to prep a car and drive it. The mainstay of these events were British cars because they are simple and cheap, fun and numerous, but the owners, if they are still alive, are curmudgeons now, and have dropped out of the sport. All the heroes, the drivers and car owners and race car builders are dying off.

Now you will find Datsun, Mazda, Jaguar and Ford Sedans, Ford Focus and other modern hot-hatches, NASCAR road race cars, even a pickup truck road race truck, not from a truck racing series, something pulled off the street, lowered, big tired, hot-rodded, and road raced. Anything to pay the track rental.

Modern cars, Camaros and Mustangs with V8's have at least 425 horsepower right off the show room floor. A full race 289 Mustang can't keep up with them. Performance versions of these new cars make the old Mustang race cars look slow. No glory in driving a full race Shelby GT350 R Model at 9/10ths and being passed like you are going backwards by a new Mustang bought at a new car dealership, and driven on the track with no modifications. I can't keep up with them in my Cobra.

It was not like this in the 1990s when a new Mustang couldn't keep up without a lot of modification. I posted photos of late model cars because that's what was out there.

Its sad. The sport is dying, lost to video games, tablets, cell phones I guess. The ranks of the people who do this I getting very thin. Most of the real vintage race cars are only seen in garages and museums.

Ford brought an 18 wheeler with a couple of their new performance Mustangs, a Ford GT and professional driver/instructors. The GT owned the track, ran 20 seconds a lap faster than the average vintage race car. An awesome car. Makes me want to go to a modern GT race. I need to warm up to that. Vintage racing is dying. I like photographing the old cars more. New cars are spec racers that all look alike to me, or GT cars that are similar. I like watching some I can relate to, something I can drive on the street, the street legal version.

Backed by high-dollar teams and NASA technology, racing isn't the fun it was when a small bunch of crazy, creative guys built something in a garage and raced it. It wasn't quite all that primitive. The big companies participated, supported it, but the DIY guys were out there too and the racing was much more fun and much less a business.

Enjoyed the set--I'm a sucker for cars from that era because they're what we sketched in the margins of our notebooks and raced on our slot car sets. Now the moneyed folks have driven them to eyebleed prices and I simply couldn't imagine wrapping a Shelby Mustang around a tire stack. Ah well.

Have never shot cars on the track but from the occasional pro cycle race and more soccer matches than I can count, will note the move to the M1ii is a significant one across the board. Great to hear you get good results from the 40-150+MC14, my results are more mixed (focus accuracy, primarily) but I tend to use it in challenging conditions when I don't also have the 300/4 with me.

Cheers,

Rick

Soccer is more demanding of an AF system because cars are bigger targets that move predictably. A PEN or an EM-5 MKI can manage cars, just not as easily as the EM-1 does. The EM-1 does this significantly better in my experience especially for the money since prices for good used ones are so appealing now. I don't feel like I need a MKII for this.

I think OLY could have kept selling the MKI right alongside the MKII for $1,200 when the MKII was still $2000, for $900 now. I wonder if they ever considered it. Its still a great camera IMHO, if you don't need the performance of the MKII - thereby maybe the reason it was discontinued. OLY might have sold fewer MKIIs, maybe not enough to make the product profitable. Just wild speculation on my part.

Many, if not most, Shelby Mustangs you see on the track are clones. Its easy to make a clone from a Mustang. Just find an old one, order the parts, and bolt them on. That's what Shelby did. He was a tuner, not a car manufacturer. No need own or risk a real one. you can drive one for $20-30K.

Speaking to the owner of the only King Cobra - photo below; he said, "I can race this car because if I crash it the cost of restoring it is only 2% of the value of the car. If it weren't worth so much I'd have to throw it away."

The more expensive the car, the more it can be restored from a violent accident.



But if you don't want to risk your car you can do what this guy did. Have a perfect scale model of the city of Monaco slot car track built in your 40 car garage.







This guy spend $250,000 on this handmade track, built by architectural model makers, for less than the value of any one of his vintage race cars. If he crashes one of these cars, probably cost him....tube of glue?



How's this for an appropriate sign above the Ford GT?

Rick,

A lot of those cars out there are one of these, this one rotting away outside in a small town in Eastern Washington, as of April 2018. I stumbled on this one. No, I didn't know on the door. Maybe I should have.









You can pick one of these up cheap, almost for nothing when the owner decides its time to sell NOW.

You can have the parts delivered in a week while you take it apart, do a little body work, put some paint on it, do it at the local body shop cheap or put in a little sweat equity. Build the car in a month or so. It isn't hard. Some of the guys who do this barely made it out of high school - or didn't.

A simple car, you can build any way you want, look any way you want, make it much faster than they were. This car can have a 500hp small block compared with a race engine with 350Hp in 1965, much better and bigger tires, better suspension.

You can get it done for $20-25K if your careful. Nobody will know you rescued a street car. It can look like a 1965 race car. Only an expert can tell the difference with close inspection, and they can be fooled. You can borrow date code stamps and "make" original parts. They do it for original cars with parts missing or un-restorable.

If you find a fastback, it will cost a little more, but you can make it look like a GT350. This is a lot of what's out there in driveways and on race tracks. If it gets destroyed, the parts are salvaged and put on the next one. Doesn't happen often. They aren't racing for money. They don't have sponsors to fund the next one. If they hit another car they are out for the season.

You can spend $1,200 for track day insurance on your $300K late model Ferrari, but not for a $25K track car Mustang. If you crash, you go to the bank and start over, but the most you can lose is $25K and your life.

Makes the owners of $150-250K vintage Mustang race cars angry. Makes the clone owners happy. They have all the fun and little of the stress.

Harvey

Never seen anything like that slot car race track Harvey. The tracks I raced on didn't have scenery, only a track and if you went off it didn't damage any expensive models, just your car. Of course that was more years ago than I can recall. Likely before 1964.

Andrew

MShot said:

Soccer is more demanding of an AF system because cars are bigger targets that move predictably. A PEN or an EM-5 MKI can manage cars, just not as easily as the EM-1 does. The EM-1 does this significantly better in my experience especially for the money since prices for good used ones are so appealing now. I don't feel like I need a MKII for this.

I think OLY could have kept selling the MKI right alongside the MKII for $1,200 when the MKII was still $2000, for $900 now. I wonder if they ever considered it. Its still a great camera IMHO, if you don't need the performance of the MKII - thereby maybe the reason it was discontinued. OLY might have sold fewer MKIIs, maybe not enough to make the product profitable. Just wild speculation on my part.

Many, if not most, Shelby Mustangs you see on the track are clones. Its easy to make a clone from a Mustang. Just find an old one, order the parts, and bolt them on. That's what Shelby did. He was a tuner, not a car manufacturer. No need own or risk a real one. you can drive one for $20-30K.

Speaking to the owner of the only King Cobra - photo below; he said, "I can race this car because if I crash it the cost of restoring it is only 2% of the value of the car. If it weren't worth so much I'd have to throw it away."

The more expensive the car, the more it can be restored from a violent accident.

But if you don't want to risk your car you can do what this guy did. Have a perfect scale model of the city of Monaco slot car track built in your 40 car garage.





This guy spend $250,000 on this handmade track, built by architectural model makers, for less than the value of any one of his vintage race cars. If he crashes one of these cars, probably cost him....tube of glue?

Click to expand...

This could be the most mindboggling mancave installation I've ever seen. I'd love to unloose a pack of ten-year olds there.

Cheers,

Rick

--
Equivalence and diffraction-free since 2009.
You can be too; ask about our 12-step program.

I'd like to be a 10 year old in there!

Look at the Land Rover overtaking the Ferrari on the track Haha!

Harvey

In the lower left corner of the second photo you see a building where 9 people and I rented this tiny one bedroom condo, a converted hotel room, for $15,000 for the 2000 race. We had the top floor middle unit. A $1,500 ticket in 2000.

Yeah, the model is accurate. I'm probably inside, waiting for the start, LOL.

I have photos shooting down on the track somewhere on a hard drive taken with an OLY C-5050, and a few of me s**t-faced on the terrace with the owner. I was too drunk on champagne to follow the race. The food was good too. Shumaker or Coulthard won, can't remember which that year. I went twice. Once in the middle of a business trip, once on vacation. This was the vacation trip. Great time. Bucket list event, and worth any price - it is so amazing an experience.

The owner made $30K renting her flat out during race week, enough to pay the bills for a year on her Monaco flat and her Hollywood, Florida condo. She watches the race every year with her customers. What a business!

I got it wrong, very wrong.

Why would you buy the model when you can have the real thing?

All you have to do is buy a flat on the track in Monaco, and be there for the race. Tough job but somebody has to do it!

Took a few from 1/40 to 1/100 shutter speed, ISO LOW, - .3EV to see how it would work. Shot jpgs on "Fine". Didn't know the camera wasn't set on SF. Need an ND filter to open the aperture. Took these with the rangefinder style PL-7 and the 14-150. The backup kit.

Nothing like being there.....






Condo Owner on Left




From the Balcony




The Royal Family




Such a Tourist




Tiny Place, Balcony Included. This is living room and dining room. $15,000 for group of 10 on race day 2000. Food and drink were good. View was spectacular.




Different rental for qualifying day. Race Day Rental is 6 story building on the left. Like the model




Did the modelers get it right or no?








Bad Photo of Schumacher from 1999. Went that year too. He won easily.

Which would you choose? $250,000 for the slot car track or 166.66 condo rentals for the race? (share with 9 other people).