Summernats City Cruise 2014. So many pictures

Focal length, bintang shirts and cries of over estimating the crowds.
Who cares. This is about tourism, skids and elite vehicle building.
I liked Sky whale, I earn 150k and I own a 50 year old Australian muscle car.
Call me a bogan if you like, I don’t really care. Some of you guys just post on here because you don’t have your own hobby.

Felix the Cat said :

BelcoMan said :

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

According to the Canberra Times there were 30,000 people. I find this hard to believe myself, I would believe maybe 3000 but I only saw the people close to Civic so there amy of been many, many more lining the streets to EPIC.

BelcoMan said :

To those who believe, based on these photos, that this event has changed in any way please go along and then let us know. Sorry to say that this is still the same Bintang singlet event it always has been

No one is forcing you to go to Summernats or you to even read this thread. This thread is obviously about Summernats so if you dislike it so much then why are you here reading it and commenting?

Because I, like so many other Canberrans, disagree with the ACT Government funding a Bogan Fest that is solely created for the purpose of generating a profit for a private individual.company whilst all along inconveniencing the locals as well as all of the other dissatisfaction that goes along with the event.

That is the reason I will continue to read this thread and others like it to voice my opinion on the waste of our tax money.

Thanks for asking 🙂

LSWCHP said :

BelcoMan said :

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

To those who believe, based on these photos, that this event has changed in any way please go along and then let us know. Sorry to say that this is still the same Bintang singlet event it always has been

Ah Jeez, I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cultured bloke, but having been to Bali I naturally own a Bintang singlet. Now I discover that this means that I’m a bogan revhead. I will put down my stubby of Pilsner Urquell (which is a damn fine drop) and go buy some VB.

Remember your local poet. Always thirsty, never bogan…

KB1971 said :

The two stand outs for me?

The chrome painted big block VE, that paint is so hard to get right and looks tha bomb when it is …

Are you sure that is not vinyl wrapping? Not that I care what anyone does to a dirty Holden.

Felix the Cat said :

BelcoMan said :

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

According to the Canberra Times there were 30,000 people. I find this hard to believe myself, I would believe maybe 3000 but I only saw the people close to Civic so there amy of been many, many more lining the streets to EPIC.

ACT Policing are saying 20,000.

One thought that occurred to me as I watched the cars go by was that almost all of them (except the Goggomobile for example) looked like they could go very quickly in a straight line, but I doubt if very many of them could take a corner at speed. It’d be interesting to put them on a curvy racetrack and see how they’g go against a stock V6 Camry or Commodore.

BelcoMan said :

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

To those who believe, based on these photos, that this event has changed in any way please go along and then let us know. Sorry to say that this is still the same Bintang singlet event it always has been

Ah Jeez, I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly cultured bloke, but having been to Bali I naturally own a Bintang singlet. Now I discover that this means that I’m a bogan revhead. I will put down my stubby of Pilsner Urquell (which is a damn fine drop) and go buy some VB.

switch said :

Why weren’t the numberplates blurred out?

Because johnboy got the focal length wrong?

(I’m just trolling trying to get the fascinating camera talk going again…)

Is it just me or does anyone else see the little girl sitting on the lap of the front seat passenger in this CT pic published online?:

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/photogallery/act-news/summernats-2014-in-photos-city-cruise-20140102-3071c.html?selectedImage=8

bigfeet said :

I hate an inappropriate ‘my focal length’ is bigger than yours argument.

There are certainly photographic displays where those discussions are warranted. This isn’t one of them.

Great pics JB. Thanks.

I second that, even though the discussion’s been educational for me.

I think you did a great job, JB. Thanks for the photos.

BelcoMan said :

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

According to the Canberra Times there were 30,000 people. I find this hard to believe myself, I would believe maybe 3000 but I only saw the people close to Civic so there amy of been many, many more lining the streets to EPIC.

BelcoMan said :

To those who believe, based on these photos, that this event has changed in any way please go along and then let us know. Sorry to say that this is still the same Bintang singlet event it always has been

No one is forcing you to go to Summernats or you to even read this thread. This thread is obviously about Summernats so if you dislike it so much then why are you here reading it and commenting?

montana said :

switch said :

Why weren’t the numberplates blurred out?

because this was a public event

so is parking in a public place…

switch said :

Why weren’t the numberplates blurred out?

because this was a public event

Why weren’t the numberplates blurred out?

The two stand outs for me?

The chrome painted big block VE, that paint is so hard to get right and looks tha bomb when it is and the black 57 Chevy, they are the iconic 50’s hot rod:

“Spotto a black 57 Chevy……..”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zyyp3sMdCY

johnboy said :

The bigger point was I was trying to get lots of photos of cars to work at 600 pixels.

Not the best photo of a car.

Once I had a setting I thought was doing a reasonable job (would have liked better but not to know until I got the SD card home) it was on continuous shooting.

Could have done better, will do some things differently next time.

c’mon people, its about the summergnats, not summersnaps… pics, so it did happen. all good, thanks jb.

poetix said :

If there’s one thing more tedious than detailed talk about engines, it’s detailed talk about the technical aspects of photography. Both should carry a warning when they stray outside their designated zones.

I hate an inappropriate ‘my focal length’ is bigger than yours argument.

There are certainly photographic displays where those discussions are warranted. This isn’t one of them.

Great pics JB. Thanks.

If there’s one thing more tedious than detailed talk about engines, it’s detailed talk about the technical aspects of photography. Both should carry a warning when they stray outside their designated zones.

I liked the photographs; they capture something of the messy energy of the event. Sorry, and please excuse my egregious ignorance.

Waiting for one of the Nats fanbois to come along and claim a crowd of 10,000 (haha)

To those who believe, based on these photos, that this event has changed in any way please go along and then let us know. Sorry to say that this is still the same Bintang singlet event it always has been

patrick_keogh said :

Other images have a different image quality and also different causes of image degradation. DSC05783.JPG seems to be a mix of camera shake and motion blurr, DSC05789.JPG is focus and motion blurr, DSC05795.JPG is primarily motion blurr, DSC05800.JPG is mostly just out of focus etc. etc. etc. but I stand by my original comments. If I had the NEX-5N and 18-55 lens which is f/5.6 at 55mm sitting next to the 5D Mk III and the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II and had to choose one for this photographic task, I know which one it would be.

Yes I do know that the Canon is approximately nine times the price of the Sony.

Yes I do agree that the Sony could have captured much better images. Specifically the Sony CMOS sensor has very good performance at higher ISO ratings, not too far from the full size sensors. So use it! Spin that ISO up to 3200 for this kind of shot, or even higher. The point of the Canon DSLR that I have used for comparison (or the Nikon equivalent) is that high performance autofocus, high ISO handling, huge apertures etc. mean that you don’t have to make the same sorts of tradeoffs that you do with the Sony.

We get it mate, you’ve got some expensive gear. Good for you.

You can clearly see it’s focus and DoF, exemplified in DSC05860, DSC05884.JPG, DSC05933.JPG, DSC05933.JPG and DSC05896.JPG, look at the number plates and the wheel spokes.

DSC05800.JPG is not ‘mostly out of focus’ as you say, because the steel barriers, purple dress, wrapping on the arm cast, seems on the denim shorts and blue tourist destination icons are sharp, as is the Shannons windshield decal on the vehicle behind the orange Chev seen through its windshield.

Stopping down the aperture would have made the depth of field larger and would have corrected some of the general softness that a lens in this price class will have when shooting wide open. Stopping down would have slowed it, and if I found it was dropping below 1/100 I’d bump the ISO up to 400, or 800 is desperate, but only after finding it necessary and only conservatively.

For comparison, when I was shooting music event last year, speed was as low as 1/60 and was typically around 1/125-1/160. Motion blur not an issue despite artists moving around (guitar strings, clothing seems still tac sharp) but the ISO noise was softening fine skin detail and making some messy artefacts in the smoke. Plus the contrast of the backing lighting was making the auto-focus prefer that to extreme foreground objects like the performer on occasion.

It’s not a depth of field (in front of and behind the cars are in focus) or any kind of focus problem, it’s motion blur caused by the cars moving and the slow shutter speed. The ISO needs to go up to at least 400 to achieve a shutter speed that gets them sharp.
The increased noise from higher ISO is clearly preferable to a blurred subject.
Not a JB criticism, just a jiib at amateur photography advice.

c_c™ said :

It’s not motion blur for goodness sake…
It’s a clear focus and depth of field issue in most of these images.

Sorry, I believe that you are mistaken. Have a look at DSC05752.JPG, a cream Torana SS. Look at the number plate. Obvious horizontal smearing, consistent with either motion blurring or camera shake. Not consistent with DOF or focus issues. Next look at the metal fence close by. Significantly, significantly sharper. A lot sharper. No horizontal smearing. What does this tell you?

Your suggestion of

c_c™ said :

I’d have…bumped the aperture down to 9 or 11

is poor advice. It will increase the exposure time since the lens is already wide open. Instead of being 1/125 it would have to be 1/30 or thereabouts. The result would be utterly unusable without some very careful and lucky panning. So all in all not a very useful suggestion.

I do understand that a higher ISO will result in a softer image, well more accurately it will increase noise. However there is a big gap between ISO 100 (used for this shot) and the limits for this very fine sensor. As DPreview says “At ISO 200 – 400 noise is well controlled and has nearly no impact on overall image quality. At around ISO 800 noticeable graininess begins to show, however detail is still mostly unaffected. Noise begins to affect critical image quality at about ISO 3200”. Increasing the ISO to 800 or 1600 would have allowed a shutter speed of somewhere in the 1/500 to 1/1000 range which would have been more than adequate to freeze the motion at that focal length.

Other images have a different image quality and also different causes of image degradation. DSC05783.JPG seems to be a mix of camera shake and motion blurr, DSC05789.JPG is focus and motion blurr, DSC05795.JPG is primarily motion blurr, DSC05800.JPG is mostly just out of focus etc. etc. etc. but I stand by my original comments. If I had the NEX-5N and 18-55 lens which is f/5.6 at 55mm sitting next to the 5D Mk III and the 70-200 f/2.8 IS II and had to choose one for this photographic task, I know which one it would be.

Yes I do know that the Canon is approximately nine times the price of the Sony.

Yes I do agree that the Sony could have captured much better images. Specifically the Sony CMOS sensor has very good performance at higher ISO ratings, not too far from the full size sensors. So use it! Spin that ISO up to 3200 for this kind of shot, or even higher. The point of the Canon DSLR that I have used for comparison (or the Nikon equivalent) is that high performance autofocus, high ISO handling, huge apertures etc. mean that you don’t have to make the same sorts of tradeoffs that you do with the Sony.

The Vehicle Safety Inspectors’ Ford Territories were s!#T

It’s not motion blur for goodness sake, you need only look at the wheel spokes to see that (particularly on the black car in the feature images) and 1/125 is fine for handheld shooting even without IS/VR. There’s also nothing wrong with JB’s kit, a Nex will put out perfectly fine results with the right settings. And a higher ISO softens images, with the softness increasing the higher the ISO.

It’s a clear focus and depth of field issue in most of these images. I’d have kept it zoomed out and cropped given the raw resolution of the body and bumped the aperture down to 9 or 11.

johnboy said :

Shutter was fine, the issue was focal length. I went for conservative settings to get “good enough” and got that just barely.

Nope JB, the images at 1/125 definitely show motion blurring. Faster lens, higher ISO needed to get the shutter speed down to (say) 1/400 which will sharpen them up a lot!

Using a NEX-5N with the 28-55 is sending a boy on a man’s errand. The image stabilisation has not been able to cope and the depth of field is a challenge. The lack of dynamic range leads me to guess that the shots were straight from jpeg, rather than processed from raw.

Yes it is lovely and convenient to take a small body and lens but I think I’d have preferred a f/2.8 70-200 for the task 🙂

A green P plater Nissan Pulsar? WTF! Hmmm pretty underwhelming overall. Two last model RX-7s and a Mini. Yawn. Gee, next year I’ll enter my stock FG falcon turbo.

MERC600 said :

Thanks for the piccys. Was surprised to see a goggomobil dart in the cruise, and then a rolls royce.
I suspect the dart may be worth more than the roller.
As it seems to be more of a car collectors show, and not a meeting boozeup for yahoos;

Yeah that actually shows some promise. Parade of people in 80s white Commodores covered in Bundy, Castrol and Bridgestone stickers that scream boy racer, not so much.

Maybe get a decent camera with a faster shutter speed. Something that doesn’t create blurry photos of cars driving at 40km/h.

Thanks for the piccys. Was surprised to see a goggomobil dart in the cruise, and then a rolls royce.
I suspect the dart may be worth more than the roller.
As it seems to be more of a car collectors show, and not a meeting boozeup for yahoos; I may make the effort this year, long as its not too ot.

Awesome, wish I could’ve escaped the office to be there! Thanks for posting JB.