Photographer's Perspective: Indy SX

By: Motocross.com

Posted: 03/11/09

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kardy

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Words and Photos: Jeff Kardas

Indianapolis' new Lucas Oil Stadium made for some good opportunities to make good photos. There was a lot of light floating around in there, and that made things much easier to shoot with available light. I had my buddy Carl Stone hold the light meter for me and take a reading: that's ISO1000, 1/500th and F/3.6! That's incredibly bright for an indoor stadium at night, and we were all loving it. It's a full two stops brighter than most indoor races out east.

Track access wasn't too terribly bad either (marked in green on the pic below), and the track layout made for a lot of great chances for unique pictures, too. On each side and the ends (where we all mostly hung out) there were different shots available due to there being whoops on one side (with a nice sand turn leading into them, plus the big wall jump), a rhythm section on the other, with some nice take-off shots available on the lead-in jump among others. On the ends was that big huckin' double and two sweepers in and out of it, and on the other end... nothing much.

We could even go inside the track interior a bit, but shooting wasn't so hot there except for a golden moment during the first practice when they took the big pole down on the curve-double jump and there was no T.V. video guy there hogging that section. See below for the results of that. I used an off-camera flash too, a Quantum X2D, and it worked great (for a change). I hand-held it as far away from the camera as my arm would allow, since the Feld floor jacks are not allowing us to setup any sort of off-camera flash during practice or any other time anymore. The chance to shoot that jump like this went away shortly after I did it, so I'm glad I spent the entire practice session shooting it since it was a beauty of a spot.

Here's one from that double: Q flash off-camera at ½ power (100W), ISO125, 1/100th, F/6.3

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kardy1

Posted on March 12, 2009 07:46 PM

Thanks I appreciate that. I live in a little sub-culture for one night a week and it's a pretty interesting place to be... assuming you're a geek like most of us are. Oh yea, we've grown up living moto like everyone else reading here has too so that's like the icing on the cake..