Experimenting With In Car Cameras

For some time now, I've been keen to experiment with some in car video camera work, and not long ago I finally bit the bullet and ordered in a mount from Camzilla. The mount turned up a couple of days before the weekends round of the Australian Top Alcohol and Pro Stock Bike championships at the Perth Motorplex. After testing it out in my 18 second ambulance on the way home from work one day, I decided to try fitting it to a couple of cars over the course of the weekend. The first car I put the mount and camera setup into was Belinda Hay's "Mrs Canada" 383 powered VN Commodore Super Streeter. This car runs regularly in the low 11 second zone and this particular pass was completed in 11.3 seconds.



After a quick look at the footage on the back of the camera, I decided to check out the Super Sedan lineup for something a little quicker. It didn't take long before I spotted Norbert Claite's low 9 second capable "Wild Ute", a 454 cube Big Block Chev powered Ford Falcon ute. Whereas I had mounted the camera to the passenger window glass in Belinda's Commodore, in Norbert's car I decided to fix the mount to the floor. The video from Norberts car gets a little shaky at times, which I put down to vibration in the floor rather than the mount itself, which is not only part of the testing process, but also a better result than some other video I've seen shot.



The camera is a Canon (of course) Legria FS200, it's about a middle of the range consumer camera, there's a lot of cheaper stuff out there and a lot more expensove stuff. This particular one is a model without an internal hard drive (as those often fail prematurely when used in cars a lot, due to the constant vibration), it does have image stabilisation, but I suspect the IS would be even better on a more expensive camera.

The mount is a Camzilla mount, these are assembled from components from a company called Ram mounts, and they look and feel like very solid gear. This mount uses 3 large suction cups to attach it to a flat (or almost flat) surface - it can handle slight curves, like a car window. The company claim you can use these mounts on the outside of cars as well as the inside, but aside from the wind noise problems that creates, I'm still not game doing that just yet.

Thanks to both of the teams for putting up with me trying out different locations in their cars to get these shots.

Australia Day 2010

This year for Australia Day, k8 and I decided to do something a little different, for us anyway. As long as we've been together we've been spending the day at other people's houses. This year, we spent the day at home, and cooked up a bit of a feast. We actually cooked enough for several more people to eat, but that's ok, it's all good food, and we'll be eating leftovers for a while now.

I cooked the meat, and k8 cooked some garlic potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli cheese and some roasted vegetables including potato, pumpkin and carrots. The meat side of things consisted of a pork roast and a lamb roast, both smoked in a Weber BBQ.

Cooking the meat took about 4 hours, from lighting the coals in the Weber to getting the meat onto the plate, and involved smoking the meat with hickory wood. I have previously used hickory to smoke a turkey and pork combination for Christmas, so I had some idea of how things were going to pan out today. For instance, I knew to keep an eye on things until the meat turned to the desired shade and then to wrap the roasts in aluminium foil to stop the skin from burning while I waited for the rest of the meat to cook.

Of course, a good beer always goes well with a good meal, and today's choice was Beez Neez, a honey flavoured beer brewed by The Matilda Bay Brewery.

Motorvation 24

Motorvation 24 has now been run and won, and since last weekend I've been flat out sorting photos, burning DVD's and uploading to the website. I'm now taking a few minutes to try to put together a few words on the weekend.



This was the first year for a long time that I haven't entered a car, but my club, All Fours and Rotaries Car Club, still entered 6 cars, and took out a whole stack of driving trophies. In past years we've been very successful in the Club Grand Championship, however this year the powers that be decided not to award a trophy to the Champion Club, so we'll never know just how well we performed.



In terms of crowd numbers, from my perspective track side, it certainly appeared that the gate would have suffered as a result of the hotter weather. Both days were well over 40 degrees C, making life difficult for entrants, spectators and staff alike.



If you want to check out who won what, , put together by the Motorplex staff, that will tell you almost everything you could ask about the weekends results.



I'm still working on the galleries for HighOctanePhotos.com, but they shouldn't be too far away now.

ANDRA Pro Series Top Fuel - Round 3

This weekend saw the running of round 3 of the ANDRA Pro Series Australian Top Fuel Championship. Seven cars fronted for this round, with most of the teams electing to leave their transporters parked at the Motorplex after round 2 in December.



Friday nights qualifying session saw good strong passes from all concerned, with Phil Lamattina setting quickest time with a 4.708 second pass, while Bob Shepherd rounded out the field with a 6.290 second first pass, exploding the motor just after half track, leaving a big mess for the track crew and a hole in the track.



All 7 cars were able to make it to the first round of eliminations on Saturday, and the huge crowd at the Motorplex were treated to some of the best Top Fuel racing the venue has ever seen. The first rounds racing saw Darren Morgan defeat Mark Mariani with a 4.834 second pass to a 4.858 second pass. Phil Read ran 4.870 to defeat Allan Dobson with a 5.002. Martin Stamatis made his way to the next round with a 4.809 over Bob Shepherd's 5.481. While Phil Lamattina's top qualifier spot had earned him a solo through to the next round, he certainly didn't take things easy, with a 4.694 second pass, the second quickest lap of the meeting.



The semi-finals saw Read defeat Stamatis 4.708 to 4.967, while Lamattina's 4.709 accounted for Morgan's 5.011. In the final, Read left the line ever so slightly earlier, with a 0.095 reaction time, against Lamattina's 0.120, however by the 1000 foot marker, Lamattina had edged ahead, finishing with a 4.682 to Read's 4.852.

Perth at Night - Barrack Street

Tonight, k8 and I went out for a late night photo mission with John from biante12.com and Dave and Nat from pixelculture.com



Our original intentions were to head up to Hillary's Boat Harbour, in the Northern Suburbs of Perth, however, somewhere along the way we decided to drop in to Barrack Street to see what lighting was turned on for the Bell Tower and the Perth Wheel tonight.



As it turned out, the Perth Wheel was in full operation, and the Bell Tower had most of it's lighting turned on for the night. Consequently, we spent a good couple of hours here taking photos from a bunch of different angles and playing around with long exposures, trying to make the best of a rather strange lighting situation. The intense lighting on the main structures makes it hard to pick up much detail at all in the surrounding parts of the shot, but it can be done.



I also decided to try a little freehand long exposure work, in part because I lent my tripod and remote trigger to k8 so that she could get some practise with those. I was quite happy with the way some of these shots turned out, mind you, I guess I did only work with the safer options here, using fence posts as supports, and shooting targets that had some incident light falling on them, but then, isn't that what it's all about?



After a few hours running round taking various photos, we decided to head off to Exomod Coffee in Mt Lawley, before heading home to check out our photos. Exomod is one of the few places in Perth where you can still get service after about 8pm, as they are open till 12 most days, and run 24 hours on Friday and Saturday.