Trying to capture a sense of speed, excitement, and power of motorsports in a photo is one of my photographic passions. Sadly in 2006, I’ve only covered one motorsports event: the US Sports Car Invitational (Rolex/USTCC) race at Laguna Seca back in early May (coverage here), so I was well overdue. The SJGP is doubly exciting because my work is situated along the front straight of the street course. As much of a pain in the rear it was getting in and out of the parking garage due to all the street closures prior to the race, it was well worth the pain to have race cars barrelling down near 200 mph down the streets you drive on day to day.

I ended up shooting roughly 1200 photos on Sunday, the majority of which with the following body+lens combinations:

  • 1D MK II with the 70-200 f/2.8 IS L and 24-105 f/4 IS L (mainly for panning shots)
  • 20d with the 300 f/4 IS L plus the 1.4x teleconverter on occasion. (mainly for the super telephoto shots and the close ups)
  • I also used the 17-40 f/4.0 L a few times on both bodies but the 24-105 was wide enough for most situations (other than the shots inside the McEnery Convention Center).

After a shoot, I’ll usually go through and take a couple passes through them to progressively weed out the worst photos. I do this in BreezeBrowser since it’s quick loading and doesn’t need to spend cycles needing to generate previews like Capture One does. First pass is typically spent deleting the obviously blurry ones. This time it amounted to a tad over 500 photos. Yikes. I don’t recall my sharp to unsharp ratio being that bad before, though it was only my 2nd time shooting with the slower focusing 20d in addition to the 1D MK II. I didn’t pay attention to which camera was used for each blurry photo I deleted, but perhaps that had something to do with it.

I was left with about 600 photos which I still needed to sift through and then do another pass and sort into categories: drifting, Atlantic, Champ Car, paddock, etc. All said and done, i ended up with 307 photos that I ended up processing all the way through, and just under 300 were published here.