Another weekend err...Sunday of racing and picture/video taking. This time it was held out at the Idaho Center in Nampa. A nice sunny warm Sunday much better than the last event and it showed with I believe a much larger turn out of drivers. Since it was at the Idaho Center I was able to just hang out on the grass without the need of a spotter to film and take pictures. I also brought the umbrella setup along and thank goodness I did. I definitely think it did a lot to keep me out of the sun and a good couple of degrees cooler than just being out under the sun. It may look a little goofy but it rocks like nothing else.

What also rocks is the new camera car mount. I was a little worried to be honest as after attaching it to a car and letting it sit there for a while it seemed to lose just a bit of suction not a lot but enough to make me worry just a bit but all was good and it hung on for three outings on various cars. Oh course one of the videos got messed up some how so only got three on car videos. I did try hard to get at least one video of most of the cars that were out there some I just didn't care for but I'm trying to get every one's car more than just a lot of videos of a handful of cars.

I was also taking still pictures and trying to do the whole motion capture thing so the cars look like they are in motion and all that jazz. Still working on fine tuning that aspect of my photography. I also wasn't in the best place for pictures compared to videos. And speaking of places to be for being in a relatively safe place that black Dodge Neon with a major front end plow problem came damn close on one run.

It was a lot of fun as usual. I managed to hang around all day this time thanks to the umbrella and having the day off. Found out that a lot of people are watching the videos and really enjoy them, which is always a nice thing to hear. I still need to figure out a way to cut down on the wind noise from the on car videos and I think I'll be heading to a music store to look at mic covers. You can the pictures here and the videos are all here.

I missed a good number of spins but I also got a few good ones as well. Like this one from a Corvette engined Datsun 240Z. There was another great one from a Mercedes Benz as well where the driver was able to save it and keep going.

Weee. It's finally here the 2009 autocross season has finally started and it got off to a great start even if the weather tossed us all a curve ball on Saturday with a bit of rain which slowed some people down but didn't bother others. I did take project umbrella out there but since it was heavily overcast most of the day I decided I didn't need to use it until it started to rain. Of course even though it was overcast I STILL got a bit burnt. But the umbrella did keep my camera and video equipement nice and dry an allowed me to keep filming in the rain. Well until the battery died and I ran out of space on the camera while shooting raw which thanks to me setting the camera up wrong turned out nothing but crap.

I only attended the Saturday event but I have to say there was a rather large turn out for a cold first day event. There was a large crowd of novice and first time drivers and drivers who where in the new run group called IMS. Also out there was the black Corvette with the huge monster wing from last year. He started off the day run around in circles doing god knows what (breaking in new tires?) and he ended up almost wrecking his car as he had to have come inches away from hitting one of the light poles in the parking lot. He didn't last long as on his second (third?) run of the day his car started making some horrid grinding noises and he just let loose and whipped his car around the course madly and called it a day. It was at that time that the video camera battery died right after his first corner so I was upset that I didn't get any video of that last run.

I got all my videos uploaded to youtube of course so you can check them out and I also dumped my snapshots that did turn out on to flickr as well. Next race is April 18 and 19 but I'll most likely only go to the one on the 19th as the one on the 18th is a training day for younger drivers. Hopefully by then I'll have found an actual battery that will work for my video camera.

Here's Leo taking a little spin in his Mazda RX-7

The last piece finally fell into place this weekend when I stopped by Idaho Camera, a locally owned all things camera outfit here in town, and picked up my light stand for less than I could find them on the Internet for. So all total now I spent about $75 on an interesting (to me at least) way to give my pasty white ass some shade while out filming autocross events. Of course if I had known that they were only $20 here in town I would have picked one up a long damn time ago.

Anyways I put it all together superglued the base of the airfreshner Race Queen to the stand and tried it out for a little bit. It definitely so far works for what I want it to do and will give it the final test run this coming weekend when I take it out to the Expo Center for the first Autocross event of 2009.

I'm really looking forward to that because not only do I have shade I have an easy way of telling people that I'm out filming as all they'll have to look for is the Green and White Umbrella from Tein. While I don't have anything to do with Tein they had the best looking and least expensive and easily to get large umbrella. Plus they are a cool company I just can't use any of their merchandise on my lame cheapo Chevy Lumina.

I just might be able to use the exposure to get more umbrellas for next year. That's what I'm going to try for anyways as I'm not entirely sure if the umbrella will make it through the entire year. I hope it does but it is white in part after all.

A close up look of the itty bitty race queen.