I’m just going to randomly dump a few photos in here without flooding the place. My story is this: I did photography when I was young and then life got in the way. Somewhere in the house there are huggins of shots from Donington from when I were a whippersnapper and ffs, I need to hunt them down - tons of Touring Car stuff, XR Owners Club days out etc.
Plenty of Photoshop use over the years, professionally but not really editing photos - there’s a world of difference and a huge learning curve but luckily I knew the tools - just not what I should be doing. I then bought an entry level-ish DSLR camera (Nikon D5200 if we’re going to get specific) about 10 years ago and sort of picked the hobby back up but without any real thought other than ‘ooh look, it’s a Lotus’ and that was that. Just as we started to meet up again that summer in 2020 I picked the trusty camera up and started snapping for NYLOC’s Instagram - we needed to push ourselves socially on Facebook and Insta so that was a good thing for me to channel my efforts on. I then started turning up at the LoT days as a spectator and just snapping away with something like a 3% hit rate and even then, I was binning some of those that made the cut. What the hell was I getting wrong? Bought a better lens, that made a huge chunk of difference to the quality but still, terrible hit rate. It’s definitely me, I’m not as good as I used to be but if I’d been this bad back in the 80’s I’d have found another hobby.
So in November I had a choice, do I spend a big chunk of brass and go to the very latest stuff or do I buy used but get something more aimed at sports - faster focussing and faster overall (the old camera would choke up if you took a few pics in rapid succession). Let’s keep it cheap and see how we go. Jesus, what a difference. For a few hundred quid, I picked up a mint Nikon D500 body and it’s gone from a 3% hit rate to about 90% (some might be shit but they’re in-focus shit). I hate to blame the tools because we never had autofocus (I remember focussing when it was all fingers and thumbs) but this was one of those ‘why didn’t I do this sooner’ moments.
OK, old camera here for Oulton in October last year, managed to land a few but the light was terrible for most of the day, about a 20 minute blast of sunshine and then gone again. I’ll try to add to the thread over time.
Oulton Park October 2024
