Greymouth Street Races with Lumix S5 and 70-300mm

The Greymouth Motorbike Street Races is an annual event, run every Sunday of Labour Weekend (a public holiday weekend here in New Zealand), and is one of the few street race events still held anywhere in the world. As such, it draws a big crowd, and competitors from all over New Zealand.

It also happens to be a fantastic event to photograph. With motorbikes hurtling past you at up to 165kms an hour, often literally only at arms length, it will test the reflexes and autofocus speed of the most advanced camera systems.

I haven't photographed the event for several years - partly due to other commitments, and partly due to bad weather in previous years. I decided to go this year and try my luck with my S5, and my newly acquired Panasonic L 70-300mm f4.5-5.6. I haven't really shot with the 70-300mm since acquiring it a few month ago - and the Street Races would be the prefect test for it.

Greymouth Street Races 2026. Lumix S5 with L 70-300mm. f6.3 @ 1/2500th, ISO 400. 170mm

Whenever I'm shooting anything that is travelling so fast that if you blink you literally miss it, I don't use the cameras autofocusing system. Instead I go 'old school' and zone focus. I pick a point (usually the bend in the road) where I want to capture the action, and then I manual focus on that point. I set the camera on continuous shooting (the S5 captures 7fps in manual mode - which is plenty fast enough) and then fire off a burst of images when the bikes enter the zone of focus. Of the burst of 4 or five images, usually at least 2 or 3 of them are in sharp focus. At least that's the plan.

No.69 Daniel Bradley - 2016 Kawasaki ZX6R. f.8 @ 1/2000th, ISO 800. 300mm

Not a bad plan as it turns out. The S5 has two handy features to help when setting this sort of shot up. First, when you manual focus you can enable a magnification of the focus area to achieve critical focus - and second, whatever is in focus has 'focus peaking' (if you enable it) so that you can visually see what is in focus. Even travelling as quickly as they were, I could see the bikes glow red (I have my peaking set to red but you can choose other colours) when they came into the zone of focus. How cool is that!

An odd thing happened throughout the day while using this technique however. After a while, the manual focus would go 'out of focus' and I would have to refocus again. I actually found myself flicking the AF/MF switch on the lens and doing a quick autofocus and then flicking back to manual before the riders came around the course again. I can't for the life of me figure out why the manual focus would go out of focus when I wasn't anywhere near the focus ring? It's a mystery...

660 - Gary Graham, 2021 Aprillia RSV4. f8 @1/3200th, ISO 800. 300mm

With the occasional manual focus issue, I wasn't feeling as confident as I would like with the S5 and 70-300mm combination. This also wasn't helped by the fact that I photograph wearing my 'long distance' glasses so everything is nice and sharp through the viewfinder. But when I go to look at the back of the camera, it's all a bit of a blur! Consequently, shots don't look all that sharp to me in review. In fact they look down-right out of focus! This does not, I'm sure you'll agree, foster massive confidence in your images.

I choose, however, to trust the process - and the gear - that what looked in focus in the viewfinder (and glowed red) would indeed be in focus. And then I just had to let the quality of the lens do the rest. At the end of a very long days shooting (about 7 hours and 2500 images later), I can't say that I was all that confident that I had a card full of 'keepers'? And would the new lens perform?

778 Riley Foster & 399 James Carley - Supermoto. f7.1 @ 1/1600th, ISO 1000. 300mm

Okay, it performs.... (as you can see from the images in this post). In fact it performs astoundingly well! I was delighted when I had finished loading the images on to the computer and opened them in Adobe Bridge. The first few were slightly out of focus (heart dropped), and then 'bang' - tack sharp! And that was the tale of the next few hours editing the 2500+ photos. A sequence would start out slightly out of focus, and then bang, bang, bang - three tack-sharp images as the bikes moved through the zone.

I made sure not to shoot wide open (f5.6) at the full 300mm (never a lenses sharpest combination) to guarantee as much sharpness as I could eek out of the lens. And it didn't dissapoint.

Background separation at f8 and 300mm is still reasonable - and I tried to help myself by choosing as clean a background as I could when setting up in a position on the track.

31 - Ian Reed - 2016 BMW S1000RR. f7.1 @ 1/3200th, ISO 800. 200mm

Am I happy with the results? You betcha. Happier than a pig in mud! I've been shooting the Street Races for probably the last 20 or so years (on and off), and these results are probably the best (in terms of sharpness, colour, clarity) I've ever achieved.

Some will say that the Panasonic Lumix S5 isn't a sports camera. And to be fair, it probably isn't. Some will say that the 'cheap' L 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 isn't a motorsport lens. And again, maybe not. But does that mean you can't get amazing sports/action images with this combination? The proof, as they also say, is in the pudding.

How's my pudding? Delicious! 😋

TPP Corner, Greymouth Street Races 2026. f8 @ 1/3200th, ISO 1000. 77mm

Pre-focusing for action photography

Every year in the town where I live, they put on a motorcycle street race event. It's always over a long weekend (Labour Day here in NZ), and it's always a great day out. Especially if we get a warm spring day.

Fortunately, the weather Gods were smiling on the event this year, and the weather couldn't have been better. So I decided that I was going to attend this year and use the chance to get in a full day of photography - a very rare occasion nowadays. 

Catch me if you can. Sony A7iii with Sony G Master 100-400mm.  f/5.6 @ 1/2500, ISO 400

In my previous post I talked about scoring a bunch of Minolta lenses from a friend (thanks again Stew) to use for the event. Specifically the Minolta 100-400mm f/4.5-6.7 Apo and a Sigma 180mm f/3.5 macro. I was looking forward to using these on my also borrowed Sony a99.

I have shot this event several times over the years, with a lot of different gear, so I knew that lenses in the vicinity of 200mm would be about right if I wanted to get close to the action. In fact there are places around the track where you can get so close as to almost reach out and touch the riders as they hurtle past at 100mph. I kid you not! I, however, like to keep a slightly safer distance from the action as it unfolds. So the 100-400mm and even the 180mm macro were going to be about perfect for the whole day.

The observant among you (I'm sure that's everyone who reads this blog) will have noticed by now that the opening image in this post was not taken with the a99 in combination with the two lenses I've just discussed. It was taken with much newer gear that I also had a chance to 'play' with. More on that later.

Knee-scraping action. Sony a99 with Sigma 180mm macro. f/4 @ 1/1000th, ISO 200

It may, at first glance, seem unusual to take a macro lens to a motorsport event. Macro lenses are for close up photos of bugs and flowers - aren't they? Well yes, they are. But they can also be used as a 'normal' lens. And they also tend to be reasonably fast, and reasonably sharp. For a 180mm focal length, that's a pretty slick combination.

The one thing they maybe aren't, however, is extremely fast focusing. And neither is the 10 year old Sony a99. 6 FPS (frames per second) isn't what you would call blazingly fast. And its continuous autofocus isn't anything spectacular either. It's a fantastic landscape camera. But for fast sports action shooting - not so much.

But then again, I knew this wasn't going to be a problem. Because my favourite technique for shooting these extremely fast action sports is rather old-school. It's known as pre-focusing, and was used by all the sports photographers before this snazzy thing called autofocus tracking was invented. And it's pretty easy to do.

Bascially, just put your camera into manual focus (yes, I know, manual focusing is scary - but bear with me), 'pre-focus' on an area that you know your subject is going to move through, and then fire a burst of images as they move through the pre-focused zone. All in manual focus. Simple. And very effective.

All concentration. Sony a99 with Minolta 100-400mm Apo. f/6.3 @ 1/800th, ISO 640

There's really only one drawback using this method. You have to take a lot of images to make sure you get the sharp frame you are after. Unfortunately this dramatically increases the processing you need to go through afterwards. And I mean dramatically. For example, to get a decent 'hit rate' using this method, I took over 3500 images on the day. That's not a typo. 3500 images! And of that, around 80% are out of focus and will needed to be deleted. I'll probably end up throwing away 3000 images. But at least I'll be left with about 500 sharp ones.

Despite the tedious post-processing that this technique requires, I'm very happy with the results. If you don't have the latest and greatest gear, or a camera system that isn't optimised for fast action autofocusing, then this really should be your go-to technique.

Of course there is a better way. And it's not going to please the 'gear doesn't matter' brigade. Because for some types of photography (in fact for most types) the gear does matter. This was made abundantly clear to me later on in the afternoon.

Out in front. Sony A7iii with Sony G Master 100-400mm. f/5.6 @ 1/1600th, ISO 400

My mate Stewart turned up in the late afternoon to see how I was getting on. We chatted for a while, I told him that I was using the pro-focus technique, and he asked me if I would like to try using his Sony A7iii with Sony 100-400 G Master lens for a while?

Who am I to turn down an offer like that! So of course I said yes - thinking that I would fumble my way through, making a terrible hash of trying to follow and capture the action. OMG - was I wrong!

You can always hear the roar of the bikes approaching before you see them so you have some time to prepare. Stewart told me he had the camera set to focus tracking with a wide autofocus area, so all I needed to do was point and shoot. Yeah - right!

And yeah, he was right! As the first riders came screaming around the bend, I held the camera up to my eye, the focus points instantly locked onto the front rider, and they all lit up green. Click-click-click, the shutter fired in blazingly quick succession, and I had a series of tack-sharp images. All of them!

Need for Speed. Sony A7iii with Sony G Master 100-400mm. f/5.6 @ 1/2000th, ISO 400

I almost couldn't believe the speed and accuracy of the autofocus on the A7iii, paired with the Sony G Master 100-400mm teleophoto. It was mad, crazy, unbelievably fast. And the results were so much sharper than anything I got with the Minolta 100-400mm or Sigma 180mm. Period! I've never used anything quite this fast and accurate before. It was scary good - and exhilarating - I'm not gonna lie. 

It also happens to be over NZ$7k worth of kit! So yeah, there's that.

If you can afford it, and if you need it, then absolutely go for it. If I was doing this for a living it would be a no-brainer.

And for the rest of us mere mortals? Well, there's always the pre-focusing technique. Which does work. It just requires a lot more computer time in order to find the 'keepers' from the rest. 

Oh well. I'd better get back to post-processing then, I guess?

Alive and kicking

It's been 6 months since I last posted on this blog! Why so long?

Well, as my last post described I had a bit of gear trouble, which took a couple of months to work through. My Sony a57's sensor was out of alignment, resulting in blurry images no matter what I did (unless the camera was focused to infinity). The camera store was really good about working this out with me (thanks Greg and the team at Photo & Video in Christchurch). They tried to find me another a57 (or equivalent) to replace the faulty camera - since it wasn't really worth repairing the sensor alignment issue.

Anyhoo - long story short - they couldn't find me a replacement, so I took my Olympus E-M1 back (with two Panasonic kit lenses). I dived back into micro four thirds, and even started a new Wordpress blog about it. So I may not have been writing about photography on this blog, but I have been writing on another.

So why this new post here? What gives?

Greymouth Street Races 2022. Sony a99 with Sigma 180mm macro. f/4 @ 1/1000th, ISO 200

A few reasons spring to mind -

A) it's about damn time I wrote something on this blog!

B) the Wordpress experiment didn't go all that well. I didn't really enjoy Wordpress as a platform.

C) things are starting to happen again in my photography sphere, and I want to write about them.

and D) it's about damn time I wrote something on this blog!

First things first, you'll notice that the above image, of last weekends (as I write this) street races, wasn't taken on my Olympus E-M1. I still have the Sony a99. And I still enjoy using it. And I still have access to some fantastic lenses for it. So no - I still haven't given up on using the Sony A-mount system. Things have, in fact, got even more muddy in those waters recently. Let me explain....

No.74. Sony a99 with Sigma 180mm macro. f/4 @ 1/1250th, ISO 200

Stewart - my photographer friend who I can borrow all this Sony gear from (hi Stew), called me recently and asked if I was still interested in using the Sony A-Mount gear. He has moved over fully to Sony E-Mount now, and was wondering whether I wanted his A-Mount gear!

That would be a YES!

We left it at that, but with the Greymouth Street Races coming up, I had an excuse to spend a full day on photography (a rarity). I got back in touch with Stewart and asked if he might have any telephoto lenses I could borrow for the a99. A couple of days before the event Stew turned up at my house with a bag full of lenses and proceeded to hand them to me. Two stood out as useful - a Minolta 100-400mm APO f4.5/6.7 and a Sigma 180mm f3.5 macro. But he also 'gave' me a Minolta 100mm macro (fungi photography here I come!), a Minolta 28-75mm f2.8D (gorgeous), and a beautiful Minolta 85mm f1.4.

See what I mean about being able to get good glass for the Sony A-Mount system! There's no way I could afford to get the equivalent lenses for my Olympus - or any other system, for that matter. I feel very blessed, and very spoilt. But I can't lie, I'm also now a little confused.

No.99. Sony a99 with Minolta 100-400mm APO. f/6.3 @ 1/800th, ISO 640

I've written before on this blog about how much I enjoy using the Sony a99. It's a full-frame beast of a camera, with a tonne of great features, and is a joy to use. But, (there's that but) I've also said that it isn't a camera body that I could base a system around, given that it's had a lot of professional use and is certainly nearing the end of its rated lifespan. So I would need to get another, lighter used a99, or similar, to seriously consider it as my new system going forward.

And there in lies the rub.

For some reason, Sony users here in New Zealand who have mint condition a99's, expect ridiculous prices for them. Far more (and I mean FAR more) than I would expect to have to pay for one. I know they are a good camera, but come on people...

And it doesn't stop their either. I would also consider getting an a77 - their top A-mount APSC body, if not for the fact that it too tends to fetch crazy-stupid prices on the secondhand market. What is it with these Sony users?

No.54. Sony a99 with Sigma 180mm macro. f/4 @ 1/1000th, ISO 200 

I guess I'll just have to bide my time and wait for something to come along at the right price? I'm sure it will? 

And even though the Sony A-Mount is a 'dead-end' (discontinued a year ago by Sony), for me it's practically the ideal camera system. I love the weight and feel of a traditional DSLR, but I also really love the 'new' technology that includes electronic viewfinders. The Sony SLT (single lens translucent) technology has both.

I think at this point I'd be crazy not to be thinking about going down the Sony A-Mount route. With my Olympus E-M1, I have the camera body and two Panasonic kit lenses. That's it. With the Sony A-Mount, I have the full-frame a99 (admittedly on its last legs), a Minolta 28-75mm f/2.8D, Minolta 24-105mm f/3.5-4.5D, Minolta 16mm f/2.8 fisheye, Minolta 50mm f/2.8 macro, Minolta 100mm f/2.8 macro, Sigma 180mm f/3.5 macro, Minolta 100-400mm f/4.5-6.7 Apo, and last, but by no means least, a Minolta 85mm f1.4. See what I mean.

If I sell my Olympus E-M1 kit, I still won't have enough for a used a77 or a99. Not without selling some other gear, or subsidising the purchase some other way. Like getting money from doing some photography. Which I will be doing shortly 😄

BTW - my next post will be about my day spent using the a99 and various lenses to actually take the street race images that accompany this post. It was an enlightening experience. But that's a story for next time...

2016 Greymouth Street Races

I love the Greymouth Street Racing event held here every year at Labour weekend. I look forward to it every year - and this year was no exception. It looked good in terms of the weather (slightly overcast but no hint of rain), and my previous experience using the E-M5 MkII had me excited for more.

Go-Kart action. Olympus OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm f4/5.6

It turned out to be a strange sort of a year this year though, and I came away feeling a little frustrated. First there was an horrific accident in the very first race of the day, that sadly resulted in the death of one of the riders. It is the first fatal crash the event has had in its 27 year history, and almost ended the day before it had begun. Racing did resume, however, at 2.00pm in the afternoon (a delay of about four hours).

F1 Rider No.121. Greymouth Street Races. Olympus OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm f4/5.6

This meant that a whole days racing was now cut down to only a few hours. Understandable given the circumstances, but disappointing none-the-less. Maybe this sudden urgency made me loose my focus, or maybe it just wasn't a good year, but whatever the reason, I found myself constantly at the wrong places at the wrong times - not getting the shots I wanted.

Motorcross Rider 450, Greymouth Street Races. OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm 

Because I had some time on my hands before racing got underway in the afternoon, I decided to walk around the whole track and see if there were some vantage points I could use to give me different photos than previous years. It turns out that there isn't, but unfortunately racing had gotten underway again and I was stuck in a section of the track that had no decent photo opportunities! There are several crossing areas spaced around the track for people to change sides every now and again, but because they were trying to get through the races quickly, I was stuck there for almost an hour before I was allowed to cross over to an area I actually wanted to shoot from! And this turned out to be the story of my day.

Catch me if you can.... Greymouth Street Races 2016. OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm f4/5.6

There are two or three areas on the track where the riders come around a bend at a low angle and pick up speed, and these are the areas I try to concentrate on. I focus on the bend, switch the camera to manual focus, and take a burst of images as the bikes reach the area of focus. I use a fast shutter speed to stop the action, and although this can reduce the sense of motion and speed in the image, I think it's made up for somewhat by the exaggerated angles that the riders achieve. There is still a lot of drama in the composition, and that's what I'm after.

Ahead of the pack. Greymouth Street Races, OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm f4/5.6

I try to get as 'clean' and as uncluttered a composition as I can, which isn't easy given the number of people at the event. Sometimes feet, legs or bodies in the background can't be avoided - but I do try to whenever possible. And a little cloning later on never hurt anyone :-)

This year, I also decided that the images actually worked better in black and white. I've never converted my street racing images to black and white before, so this was a new twist this year. I converted them in Photoshop, using the high contrast red filter setting, and dialed it back just a touch if needed. This gave me punchy, high contrast images that I like - finished off with what I hope is a subtle vignette to frame the action in the center of the image.

Total concentration. Greymouth Street Race, 2016. OM-D E-M5 MkII with Zuiko 40-150mm f4/5.6

Next year I'm hoping to have the use of a Zuiko 75-300mm f4.8/6.7 - either by getting one earlier, or renting one for the weekend. I'd like the 600mm reach for sports and wildlife anyway, so it would be the perfect lens for the street races. Josh has also expressed an interest in this lens - so maybe we could go halves and get it together?  That would be pretty cool....