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Shooting the Red Bull Air Race World Series
By © John Parker
The Red Bull Air Race World Series is best described as a 3-dimensional Formula 1 race of the skies. Like all Red Bull events, the Air Race
World Series is filled with energy, talented athletes, and a very involved crowd. With airplanes racing at over 200 mph, slicing between
gates spaced 40 feet apart less than 50 feet above the ground, and performing aerobatics and sharp maneuvers, it is an event that always
draws a crowd. Red Bull has given a new definition to air shows and air racing. If you are expecting airplanes on a circular track, looking
the same after each pass, you're in for sheer excitement with the Red Bull Air Race World Series.
I have been shooting airplanes and aviation-related events since I was a kid, and just last year began shooting the Red Bull Air Race during
their stop in San Francisco. I was surprised by the complexity of shooting these airplanes as they traveled so fast and so low, while always
changing their direction of flight. It is a little like trying to take a picture of a flying hummingbird, stopping its action, but showing
its motion. This was my most challenging shoot up to this point, and in order to illustrate the event and the airplanes in motion, I learned
it would require great skill and reliable equipment.
Over the winter, I thought about my approach to the event for 2007, and collected the necessary equipment to make shooting this event much
easier. I shoot with a Canon 1Ds MkII with lenses up to 600mm, and focus more on composition than shooting as many images as I can. Having
said that, my camera's 4 fps is perfect for my needs at this event. One of the largest bottlenecks I found from the previous year was my
memory cards. Though they were just okay for the event, this year I decided to use Lexar's new Professional UDMA 300x 4GB CF cards and recording in both
RAW and JPG formats. For me it's not a battle of how fast I can record the images, so much as it is a battle of how fast I can get them from
the card to the client. By using Lexar's new Professional UDMA FireWire 800 reader in conjunction with the UDMA cards, I find that the job is done in far
less time than before. I have not lost a single image, and the reliability of both the reader and the cards is tremendous. It has always been
my belief that there is no such thing as a card or card reader that is too fast, but after using this combination, I wonder how much faster
it can get.
I had no hesitation maxing out the cards with as many RAW and JPG images that I could fit on them, because not only are the races virtually
non-stop, but I had very little time to download the images from my cards to my computer during short breaks. This is yet another critical
area where having super-fast download speeds is a tremendous benefit! One never knows when the next gate will be cut, or an event-defining
moment will happen, and I prefer to minimize my chances of missing these critical moments. I also found it very nice not to be fumbling
around with many cards and instead be working with fewer high-capacity cards. Not only is it difficult to keep track of many cards, but
it really slows the process of organization and workflow, having to download many cards at the end of a shoot. When I first downloaded the
images, I was absolutely stunned by how fast it completed the task. So much for trying to eat a sandwich while the card reader does its job!
Integrating the card reader to my 17-inch Mac Book Pro is simple, and the compactness of all the equipment makes traveling abroad easy, yet
fully functional.
Learn more at www.principalphoto.com
John Parker Bio
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