The first weekend of the 2011 Corinthian Midwinter series was held on January 15-16, and was sponsored in part by my friends at Sailors for the Sea. Corinthian Yacht Club became the first SF Bay area club to implement the requirements for SfS certification of the race as a “clean regatta.”
Corinthian Yacht Club, Tiburon, CA.
Chris Mancini and Dan Pingaro of non-profit Sailors for the Sea.
Saturday brought light air, flat water, and big currents — not so good for on-the-water action photography. Sunday was a bit more lively. I was out on the water with videographer Vince Casselina, on a power boat donated and operated by club member —.
While I was prepared for the salt spray (microfiber dish towels and protective camera covers) I was not prepared for the failure of one of my favorite lenses, the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR. Unfortunately, after shooting some test shots at the beginning of the day, I didn’t replay the photos until I returned home and began the download / editing process. Much to my horror, over half of the shots were completely over-exposed! What happened? I tested the lens on several different bodies and had the same result – it seems that the lens aperture was stuck in the wide open position. I cleaned the contacts and reseated the lens on my Nikon D7000 and everything seemed fine. On Sunday I started shooting with the same lens, and after about 10 shots I had the same problem. I also tried it on the Nikon D700 – same problem. I found that by re-seating the lens I could make it work again, but that was VERY frustrating – I was re-seating it every 10 frames or so. I’m still not entirely certain what happened, but needless to say, the camera has been sent to Nikon for service!
Shot at 1/1000 s at f/8.0, ISO 250 - this should have been a near perfect exposure!
Much to my relief, I was able to recover many of my images with Adobe Photoshop, although the post processing took much more time than normal. I’m still not pleased with the resulting unintentional high-key look of many of the images.
After post processing with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS5 - not great but good enough for the online photo gallery.
Sunday - more wind, action, and mostly properly exposed images!
Galleries of the weekend’s racing are on the Rockskipper Photography website.
