Singapore Karting Championships 2012

Photo was taken during the afternoon practice session. The actual race is at night. It's held at the Formula One pit-stop building next to the Singapore Flyer, but the track is a lot smaller than the F1 street track. 

http://www.skc.sg/

• Nikon D7000, 55-300mm f4.5-5.6
• At 300mm, f11, ISO 800, 1/2000 seconds
• Aperture priority, center-weighted metering, auto white balance
• Picasa: Crop, straighten, auto contrast

There's a lot of distracting clutter on the race track. You want to isolate the drivers by zooming in and cutting out the background. It's a bonus if you can add some interesting geometric patterns as well.

Stopped down lens aperture to get more depth of field, a common problem when using telephoto lenses. Telephoto perspective compressed the apparent distance so it looks like he his tightly squeezed in between the plastic barriers. 

With the 1.5x crop of the D7000, effective focal length of the 300mm lens is 450mm. And that still wasn't enough for me to "zoom in" as much as I wanted. Cropping the photo on the PC, pushes the effective focal length to about 1000mm, leaving only a quarter of the megapixels in the image. It's times like this that you really make use of the megapixels in today's cameras.