Hi all,
First of all thanks for all the kind comments! As I received many requests for information, I will try to explain my steps below:
I went to the track on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Be prepared for a major hike because parking places are often situated 3kms from the circuit. Besides that, the track distance is another 7kms... You will carry a lot of stuff with you: your camera gear of course but also food, a chair and rainprotection.
For taking pictures, I only used two spots on the circuit as showed on the picture below:
All the pictures with the cars driving towards the right have been taken at spot 1, the rivage hairpin. This is a difficult 180 turn, going down. In the turn, their speed is about 135km/h. The close ups made here, are just before the turn when the cars show up at a speed of 230 km/h. Distance from photographer to the track is about 6-10 meters.
Settings for the pictures taken around this turn:
- Canon Eos 40D
- cars full in the picture with 70-200/2.8
- close ups 300/2.8
- 1/200 to 1/500
- ISO200-320
Pictures taken at spot two are more difficult. Distance to the track is quite large. I got the cars full frame in my viewfinder with this equipment:
- Canon Eos 40D
- 300/2.8 with 1.4x extender
To add speed into the picture, I used these settings:
- 1/100 sutter speed
- ISO 200
- no IS, so steady arms are necessary!
There is a bit of extra challange here. Cars just come out of a chicane and enter the long straight over start/finish. They accelerate like idiots so pretty hard to keep up with!
Below a few more pics from position 1:
If you get lucky (or unlucky!) and the sun comes out, you will have backlite here: