Quote:
Originally Posted by aaron_
Mole2k, thanks for your input!
Do you have any tips for manual focusing and "guessing" the right moment?
I tried prefocusing (although with AF) but the results weren't very good: DOF is about 40-50cm, and when you're low on the ground, there's hardly any reference for you to see, when the Buggy is about to enter the DOF.
The Nikons have a focus trap, Canon excluding the 1D series have not, which is really a shame  It could be very useful in shots where the car is coming towards you and the ground is to "flat" (perspectively spoken) to guess the distance.
The Canon focus trap means taping the last contact plate on the right of the lens when viewed from behind, but you loose any autofocus by doing this. |
Generally when I prefocus I do it at the slowest point of the corner to give me the most chance, If you are looking at a car driving towards yourself at 200mm at a relatively close focal distance then the car will go in and out of the focal plane very quickly. The trick is not to wait untill the car is in focus, if you see the car in focus in the viewfinder then you missed your window, as the car is about to come into focus I would usually fire the shutter then depending on the speed of the cars comming towards you.
The way I learnt was basically at my local club we race indoors and I would go and fire off 500-1000 shots every night practicing getting manually focused head on shots untill i could hit them at a relatively sucessfull rate. I did a few over jumps that i basically set the focus point to where the cars would be as soon as i see them pass a point.
Here is a shot from the BADMCC track in N.Ireland. The shutter speed was far to high but I didnt have any 77mm ND filters with me to slow it down enough to get a bit of wheel blur sadly. I was crouched on the ground with the camera poking through the wire mesh fence about 6" off the ground at the end of the main straight this was just into the braking zone.
