We brought several pairs of ear plugs with us, and I put mine in as we walked toward the edge of the track. I squeezed the foam tight and pressed one into each ear. As the foam expanded, it shut out the sound completely, and i could no longer hear Chris.

We approached the fence at the side of the track between turn 3 and turn 4, and began trying to take photos as the riders roared around the track during the second round of practice laps for the GP bikes. Chris had his Canon 20D and I was shooting with the Canon SuperShot Digital Elph. I just picked up the camera and tried to shoot. I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to capture the bikers in the shots.

Out of 22 photos, I got one semi-blurred photo of one of the Yamaha riders (I'm not sure which one because I can't make out the number) and one kind of cool blurred photo of American Nicky Hayden who rides for Repsol Honda.

The rest of the shots are pretty much like this one and this one -- and don't contain any motorcycles at all! It was pretty frustrating. I tried everything I could think of to time my shots just right, and it still wasn't working out. How do you like this one where I just caught the back tire of one of the bikes? At 200 miles per hour, the bikes are moving faster than the shutter speed on the camera. It kind of shocked me. I thought digital cameras could capture anything.

Thankfully, Chris' camera's faster shutter speed and telephoto lens gave him much better results. Check out the photos. (I like this one of Chris Vermeulen -- it looks like his tires are barely touching the track's surface. Still, Chris admitted that he deleted approximately 20% of his track photos also contained no motorcyle. These guys are faster than photographs, and that's starting to put it all into perspective for me.

Labels: motogp, motorcycle, photos, speed