Singapore F1
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| From Singapore F1 Export |
The first ever F1 night race was held in Singapore! In preparation for the event, many promotions were held around Singapore and I caught one of them with the FHM girls! The mock F1 car was surprisingly small. The nose of the car is made for a driver's legs and was an uncomfortably tight fit. Fortunately I had good company to consul me in my pain.
The novel idea of 200mph+ race at night seemed great to see but tickets were sold out fairly quickly with only unreasonable tickets >$2,500 a pop left when I started seriously looking into the event. A French restaurant that my co-worker frequents often comped him with a pair of complete 3 night grand stand passes - the kind with actual seats and not the cheap walk around ones. He was kind enough to part one night to me and another coworker on the team. He kept the night of the qualifying and actual race for himself and gave us official practice night tickets.
The race is LOUD! The cars are LOW. Grand stand tickets were a must because the height of the cars are lower than the cement barricades. Those with walk around tickets were left peering through breaks in the barrier. Grandstand allowed a look down onto the track. I had seats down a straight away and had cars zoom by all night.
I took the occasion to practice panning pictures of the cars as they drove by at full speed. Panning is a technique that requires moving the camera at the same speed as a moving object resulting in a picture where the object is in focus and the background is blurred. Catching a moving F1 car in my view finder was tough enough in itself. Doing so and moving my camera at the same speed as a F1 car was an even greater challenge. After playing with different shutter speeds and practicing panning, I was able to catch a couple acceptable shots. The lines in the pictures are of the chain-linked fence that had bars running vertically and horizontally. The vertical lines didn't show up due to the pan but the horizontal lines were unavoidable.
The race itself was pretty boring as all I saw were cars zoom by one after another for 2 hours straight and it was uncomfortably loud! Trying to capture good pictures of the cars made fun of an otherwise boring evening.
