Ellison moves up to fourth

Race Day

This was our first BSB Race and the first time at Outlon Park so we didn't really know what to expect.  Having spent some time walking around on the first day of the meeting we had decided to stand near Knickerbrook where you could see a reasonable amount of the race and were close enough to the circuit to get some good photos without fences obscuring the view.  As expected, this was a popular place so we were glad we'd arrived early, this also meant we avoided the traffic and got to see plenty of action in the warm-ups etc.  The weather was overcast and threatening rain, we just hoped it would hold off during the racing.

Race One

The rain began to fall just as the race started, several riders came off almost immediately and the Red Flags came out. At the restart Sykes took the lead with Crutchlow not far behind but before long the Honda passed the Suzuki and began to break away. Over the next few laps both of the Airwaves Ducati riders also passed Sykes, pushing him down to fourth. Crutchlow crashed on lap ten and although he was able to rejoin he dropped down to fifth place behind the Ducatis, Sykes and Haslam. Haslam then managed to work up to second place and put Byrne under some pressure, although he tried to pass he wasn't able to make it stick and Byrne took his second win from three races.

Race Two

The weather improved for Race Two and Sykes again took the early lead followed by Crutchlow, Haslam, Rutter and Byrne.  On lap two Byrne managed to pass Rutter but a mistake then dropped him down to thirteenth place, he was obviously not keen to stay there and set about re-catching the leaders before the field got too spread out.  Haslam passed Crutchlow to take second place and the top three stayed close with Ellison not far behind.  By lap eight Byrne had passed Camier and caught the front four, before long he was in fourth and that became second as Haslam tried a rather optimistic move on Sykes at Hizzies.  Sykes was out and Haslam rejoined in fifth position.  Byrne took the lead from Crutchlow on the following lap but soon after, the race came to an abrupt end when Crutchlow crashed heavily at Druids and the Red Flags came out again.

The Photography

I had a lot of shots of individual bikes from the qualifying and practice sessions that I was pretty pleased with, certainly the best bike photography I've done to date.  Rather than come back with dozens of similar images of single bikes that could be anywhere I wanted to see if I could add some context to the images and try to illustrate that this was actually a race, I hope I've managed to do that.

As we were not planning on moving about too much over the course of the day I took both the EOS 20D and the EOS5D with the Canon 100-400mm and the Sigma 120-300mm.  I find the 20D offers two key advantages over the 5D for motorsport, the extra magnification provided by the 1.6x crop factor of the 20D provides better results than adding a teleconverter to the 5D and it has a faster framerate.  The 5D has better low light performance which makes it useful for overcast days and the image quality is better, particularly for large prints.

Comparing them both side by side the Sigma definitely has a harder job keeping autofocus when tracking the bikes, it's no slouch but the Canon was incredibly fast.  Image quality seems about on a par between the two and the larger zoom range of the 100-400mm is useful.  However, the ability to drop to f/2.8 and control DOF is a definite plus for the 120-300mm.