Went for a nice Sunday ride a little north from my house. It’s a route that I enjoyed before and the weather was good, so I knew it would be a good little trip. The highlight of this route is from Maxdale Road, south of Killeen, heading west. Along the way, I took a small road that roughly follows the Lampasas River. After that, I found a gravel road which was a lot of fun to ride.

I got Kiki kind of dirty, but I think a dual-sport motorcycle should not be too shiny and clean. Kiki is getting a little grimy because of the ATF lube, but it’s not causing any damage or safety issues.

A fun ride, one that I will definitely be doing again when I am up in that area.

Another great vid from MotoGeo.

First off, I prefer wide-angle landscapes and cityscapes and rarely use a long lens. The longest that I own is a 100-200mm Minolta lens, and the only times I used it were at the kids’ school functions like plays and performances. At 200mm, it still doesn’t have great reach but it’s all I got, and it did a decent job and gave me a new perspective on this type of shooting.

Making photos of the motorcycles whizzing by was difficult, and would have been almost impossible for me to figure out without the help of Jeremy. He taught me a couple things about shutter-speed settings and panning. I hardly ever use shutter-priority, but that was the name of the game for most of the weekend since there was a bit of distance from the spectator areas to the track itself. For the panning shots I would set the shutter-speed at around 1/160 – 1/320, set the continuous mode to high (10fps), pre-focus manually, and then go to town. I previously thought that I would have a much higher shutter-speed to capture the action, but with panning shots, that wouldn’t work well. The reason being that most of the spots around the track had a fence or two separating you from the action, and panning at that relatively slow shutter speed would blur out the fences (the fence nearest me as I was right next to it was virtually invisible) while keeping the motorcycle in focus (assuming your panning was smooth).

I’d say that I had about a less than 5% hit rate with these shots; Most of them had bad panning or a fence post in the way. Still, I was really stoked with the shots that did come out! Since I had never done a shot like that before, there was a magic feeling that came along with the newness of it all. I was thinking, “I never knew my camera could do stuff like that! What other kinds of magic does this gadget have inside of it just waiting for me to unlock?”

The other type of shot was when the motorcycle was coming more or less straight towards me. For those shots, a high shutter-speed was essential. I shot mainly at 1/1250 – 1/4000. This kind of shot was fun to do but wasn’t nearly as exciting, and the results were also not as dynamic. Without the blurred-out background, it’s hard to get a sense of the speed that the racers were traveling at. These photos were mainly reliant on composition and framing.

I’m really happy with the photos I got and really satisfied that I learned so much. I have a new appreciation for sports photographers, and motorsports photographers specifically. If you want to see a few more of the photos I took, you can check out the flickr set I created.

Spent the day at Circuit of the Americas watching MotoGP. It was pretty great.

Nice ride this morning! Lots of motorcycles out there. Probably getting ready for MotoGP!

I love this!

Kiki and I went out for an afternoon ride close to home. The weather was great, about 72°F and sunny and I saw plenty of other motorcyclists taking advantage. Such fun! The ride was 47 miles.

How come New Zealand is so beautiful?