A decent day at Oulton Park last weekend, the promised showers managed to stay off until I was about ready to leave. I'd mainly gone to see the Firenza racing as we don't get many up here, this particular one was a reasonably famous car in its day, featuring in the BBC TV series "Driving Ambition". It's been off the track for 12 years, and this was the first outing.


web_IMGP3037 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr


web_IMGP2982 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr


web_IMGP2977 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr


web_IMGP2974 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr


web_IMGP2916 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr


web_IMGP2892 by Mike Edwards, on Flickr

As always, comments and critique appreciated.

I do love a nice sequence of images.

Yes, I believe it is, although my mate and I were discussing how similar a lot of the cars looked, especially with extra spoilers and so on. I believe (judging from the '57' on the windscreen) that it's also the car nearest to the camera in image 4.

I didn't notice until I posted that the open door of the rescue van is quite clear in the background, looking like a random thing sticking out of the front of the McLaren. Oh well.

Here's a few photos from a lovely day at Oulton Park on Easter Monday. We had much better weather than last year, and there was a decent turnout both in terms of racers, and spectators.

1.




2.




3.




4.




5.




6.




I did get a few focussing issues, not least at Lodge while trying to focus at an angle through the wire netting, and at the same time trying to block out the rescue vehicle that's always parked in the background. Sadly the two images I have of an incident aren't sharp enough to show.

As always, any comments and critique welcome. I'm happier with these than I was with the images from last year, but arguably the conditions made all the difference.

Lovely image. I went there a year or two ago (when the big animals were there) but forgot to take a tripod and a coat, so it was all a bit shaky. Were you OK with a tripod without security issues there? (presuming you had one, that is).

I share your lack of knowledge of tree makes and models.

I guess they're like a lot of other subjects - I like taking fireworks shots, but after a while they tend to look very similar because I don't tend to be bothered travelling around to get a decent foreground. Then I come on here and people have fireworks over ancient buildings, coastlines / sea fronts and so on, and they're all the better for the rest of the image.

Yes, I think I like the second image best, for the composition as much as anything else.

I was going to take some last Saturday but both (one was the Border Raider, in your lower image) were on electrified lines near me, so I'm waiting until the 27th to catch the Chester Venturer somewhere.

I have a similar affinity for bare tree silhouettes, though I've never done anything with them for some reason. I find that mine tend to look better when I'm shooting them than when I get them home.

I have a very old version of Photoshop, and use Raw Therapee when I need to do anything with raw images. I keep looking at later versions of stuff, though I made mistake in installing the 32-bit version of Windows when I built this PC last. I'm considering a hard disk upgrade, and not entirely sure whether I'll clone the drive or take the plunge and re-install with 64-bit. Even my RT is quite far behind the times, because they're not updating the 32-bit versions any more. I'd love to go with the newer PS / Lightroom products, but I don't do enough to justify (to myself) the ongoing cost. I understand why software companies want to charge that way, I just don't want them to charge me that way.

My problem is that I don't do a lot over winter, so I get a bit used to how to do things in the summer, then forget it all over winter and have to re-learn everything. Fortunately I don't do a lot of post-processing so it's not a major issue.

They're always an interesting sight on public roads - we have a couple of steam fairs reasonably close to here, and you can usually bank on seeing one or two making their way there a day or two before.