winter

A few weeks ago, I went to a Snocross event here in Mt. Pleasant. While I wasn’t able to cover the entire track, I did find a few good spots to capture images from. Most of the time I was able to keep my shutter speed up above 1/1000 of a second to freeze the fast action.

During the first hour of the event, I was over-using the 10 fps high speed shutter in the camera I was using. I was capturing RAW to a 32GB CF card, and JPEG to a 32GB SDXC card. In that first hour I ran through about half of my 32GB memory card. With my other memory cards at home, I had to re-think my approach and make a few changes.

First, I decided that I didn’t need backups of every photo, so I stopped recording JPEG to the SDXC card. Now the camera would instead capture everything in RAW and automatically switch to the SD card when the CF was full.

Second, I realized that even though snocross is fast action, I didn’t need a full 10 fps like other sports where tiny changes in position really count. So I set my low-speed continuous shooting to 6 fps.

The last change I made was in my technique. As the day moved on, I learned to be more judicious about when the best action was happening, and only held down the shutter at those more intense moments. Bursts of 20 photos with a lot of throw-away images turned into bursts of about 4-5 photos at the peak of action. That was about as few photos as I was willing to take, because the first couple photos would usually be waiting for the lens focusing to lock on to the fast-moving subjects. (For focus settings on the 7D Mark II, I used focus case 1 at the beginning of the day, and then switched to focus case 6 later which I felt helped improve the focus speed.)

By the end of the day I ended up with a full CF card and about 50% of my SD card full, so I had plenty of room. Next time I’ll not only have this experience to build off of, but I’ll make sure I don’t forget my extra cards at home for a full day sports event.

Hope you enjoy the gallery. Next up on my Instagram will be some photos I took in December at Pismo Beach.

Jake Geeseman nailing a jump.

The snowcats took good care of the track in-between heats.

Justin Gaudet rockin it

Corin Todd taking off.

Jake Angove putting the hammer down.

Zach Pattyn checks the field

Kevin Wallenstein haulin ass down the hill. This hill was pretty far from where I was standing, so I was at the longer end of my lens for this one. I had a view of the racers for a couple of seconds before they were off down the back straight.

Ian Buchman catching some air around turn 1.

Jeff Jasan starting another lap.

About 10 seconds after the start of a race everyone hits the first jump. I tried to capture the chaos here.

Brady Love riding the lip.

Jake Scott going horizontal.

Korbyn Anderson getting some nice hang time. It was starting to get dark, so I switched from the 100-400mm to my faster 85mm f1.8. I kept the lens wide open and set my ISO to 1600 (and later 2000) to keep the shutter speed around 1/1000 of a second.

Adam Renheim and Zach Pattyn racing neck and neck.

Mike George hitting the first jump in a triple along the back stretch. At 85mm, I had a fast enough lens, but not quite the reach of the 100-400. I still really liked how the powder was lit here.

Mike George celebrating

Snocross silhouette

by Mike Piatek-Jimenez

Snocross

Flying High