Mid-Ohio 2009

Dad and I have been coming to Mid-Ohio for nearly a decade now (next year is the big one-oh), and I still look forward to it every year.

This year I decided that I wanted to try my hand at getting some decent pictures. I took my 100-300 to the MotoGP races at Indy last year and got some ok shots, but Mid-Ohio is a much friendlier from an amateur photographer's point of view, so I wanted to make the most of it.

The Canon Photography Forums highly recommended Lens Rentals, so I thought I would give them a try and rent a lens that would be pretty much out of my reach at this point.

I wound up going with the Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6L IS. This is Canon's long-range high-quality zoom lens that gives excellent versatility, reasonably light weight, and a nice image stabilization system. The retail is ~$1500, but I was able to rent one for 7 days (inclusive) for about $100.

The Lens Rentals process was as smooth as I could have asked for, with excellent communication, and a handy pre-paid shipping label, so all I had to do was use it, tape it back up, and drop off at FedEx. I'll definitely use them again.

The 100-400L itself is an absolute dream. The build quality is outstanding, and although it's not super fast @ f4.5~5.6, the copy I got really shone with some decent light. At around 3 pounds, it was much heavier than I was used to, but I wound up hand-holding it for pretty much all of Mid-Ohio.


Photo courtsy of B&H Photo

I wanted to get at least a little practice before Mid-Ohio, so I went to the local park to try my hand at some bird shots. It was much more difficult that I had imagined, requiring lots of patience, and quite a few shots to get anything decent. The light was great that evening, and I wound up walking away with these:

Female Red-Winged Black Bird:



Eastern King Bird:



Needless to say, I was blown away by this first outing, and very excited for the race weekend.

Without drawing it out too much further, the race weekend was great. The weather cooperated, and there was some great action on track. I took ~1000 photos, and wound up with about 400 that didn't get deleted. Out of those, I had about 100 that I was pretty happy with.

Here are a few of the real keepers:

Aaron Yates coming into the Esses


Larry Pegram on the Ducati 1098R


Yamaha R6 in Turn 9 during Daytona Superbike Qualifying


Corona Extra Honda CBR1000RR


Ducati 1098R coming into the Esses with Suzuki in hot pursuit.


I shot most of these hand-held (although I did use my monopod for awhile) at f7.1~8 and 1/640~1/1000 and the lens performed really well. I'm hoping to make some prints out of a few of these.

Overall, a great experience that I hope to be able to repeat with a 100-400L of my own some day.