J ust a quick heads up for today’s visit at the grand prix circuit for you: I have been at the track today and uploaded a few JPGs. Excuse the raw handled files - I snipped them quickly and did not post process them extensively. For the D3, I have today tested some JPG settings, to produce a rather flat, robust JPG with very little in camera sharpening, little contrast and flat saturation. The files seems much better than last years canned profiles, which tended to burn some color highlights quickly, resulting in nasty artifacts.

I will go into more detail later.

Next to the wonderful being at a race track again after so much waiting, I wanted to warn you guys, buying your tickets at the track in Shanghai: Bring cash money!

The staff at the counter refuses, to undertake standard procedures in manually verifying credit cards by dialing in the credit card number manually and getting a permission code from their bank, that the card is approved.

Your card does not work with their machine? You are out of luck, if you have no cash with you! The metro line 11 will now bring you very close to the track as well, except officials inform explicitly, that on sunday the station will be closed, so you are up to rely on crooked shanghainese taxi drivers, who will make a good coin under the counter on sunday, only taking far away rides and charging extra. This has been a major problem last year.

I hope, somebody gets a handle on this.

I changed last years 70-200 for a bit more reach with the 300 2.8 Nikon prime. Handling is more bulky and heavy of course, but the lens is well hand holdable for normally grown persons and balances nicely with a full size body.

Image quality between the two lenses is quite different, especially if one has to use a TC for getting to the 300 mm with the 70-200, as I did regularly.

The 300 VR is simply sharp, edge to edge with focus acquisition, that could well be mind controlled, as quick it does get a lock.

A very nice upgrade from the 70-200 to the 300 VR is also the much greater minimum focus limiter, which can be activated, to limit the lens out of the close range under 6m, rather than the 2.5m focus limiter of the zoom.

This is very helpful, shooting through the several fences, making auto focus much more convenient.

So - let’s get some sleep, to be on the track tomorrow morning early…