Sorry for the delay, we were out at the California Speedway for Saturday’s STATER BROTHER’S 300.

I picked this picture to post (which is actually about a 20% crop of a JPEG-picture from my awesome D200), because I liked the expressions of the crews and officials as Anthony Foyt’s (A.J.Foyt IV) car is being towed through the pits. They pretty much tell thier thoughts on what they’re observing.

It smacked the wall hard in turn-4 during practice (you can see the back-end of the car is about half as wide as it was before the incident). Luckily, AJ was o.k. and ran a back-up car for the race.

I just had to expand this and give props to the awesome NIKON D200 and the also AWESOME Nikon 18-200 Vr zoom.

I just got the zoom last Friday (late) and slapped it on my D200 before taking this combo (no other lenses) to the track on Saturday.

Now, we had the usual “Fontana” weather, which is great to watch races with, but lousy for photography. It was the usual bright,high-contrast, no-color, haze that seems to hang in the air and make all your pictures come out black & white (with nothing in-between).

I was primarily sitting across from the pits near the start finish line. This meant, for any action-shots, this new, long-zoom lens, was going to be zoomed out to the max. Now of course you know, that with a zoom-range of 18-200mm, things usually get pretty soft at the long-end. This, coupled with the “non-Kodak” weather makes for some worst-case photo-ops, lighting wise.

I also cranked-up the ISO to 400, just to ensure I could get some decent stoppage of action, all the while using this lens hand-held. Normally this all adds up to “why-do-my-pictures-look-awful” results, but I was very pleasantly surprised when I reviewed my pictures and, considering the potential for failure, they were not too bad.

The following are CROPS to all the pictures (it “only” zoomed to 200mm, and I was very far away from the action), and it shows you what potential the D200, and the 18-200VR lens have. The D200 handled the awful-lighting with aplomb, and it’s 10+ megapixel output let me crop in tight and still have something decent to show.

I took the late-night shot of the midway at ISO 1600 and also made a crop I could very much live with (keep in mind all these pictures have been downsampled for posting as well). I call it “One Last Souvenir”.

I call this one “Disinterested Party” again, taken from far acrss the track.

The speed of the D200 is nothing short of fabulous!

Not being able to afford (or justify) a D2x, this D200 ripped off pictures faster than I could keep up with it. I could get strings of pictures of the cars at 170MPH, and not miss any of the action. Plus, even though everything I’ve read says you need high-speed CF cards to achive the highest shooting speeds, I was using my lowest-cost SanDisk memory cards and never had to wait for the camera! Just freakin-awesome! (these are NOT all the shots in the sequence, just a wide sampling)

I have a great time at Fontana, and am looking forward to taking my D200 and 18-200mm VR lens around the world on vacations!

Speaking of great lenses, here’s a shot (that I call “3-sins”) that I took at last-years AutoClub 500. This was taken with the 70-200 VR zoom “off the cuff” so to speak. Check out how sharp that coke bottle is!

Long Beach Grand Prix here I come!!