Can motorcycles fly?

Well, they can look like it sometimes. Saturday night, we got the chance to go watch (and shoot) an indoor motocross event in Morristown. Wayne, who assists us on shoots and is becoming quite a good photographer himself, also races motorcycles, so we took the opportunity to check him out and get a little experience shooting an event like this one.

As you might expect, it was very loud inside the arena, but it was a ton of fun. There was everything from 4 and 5-year-olds racing minibikes all the way to professional riders. Most of the races were only five laps around the course, which made things go by very quickly. Once the riders get to around Wayne age or a little younger, they really start taking the course with some speed and can fly off the dirt-mound hills, which you can see in the images below. One of the pro riders, who won his race, was getting 20 feet or better in the air. It was very impressive.

Shooting the event was very interesting as well. The light was not very good, so we were shooting at a very high ISO in order to get the shots to come out. I was shooting with the Nikon D700 with a 70-200mm, f/2.8 lens at ISO 3,200. LaDonna was shooting the Nikon D90 with an 85mm, f/1.8 lens at ISO 1,600. My shots are on top and heres on bottom. The D700 obviously handles the lack of light a lot better than the D90, but both cameras did a more than credible job of shooting indoors without flash. The hardest part was trying to catch the riders on a jump and get them in focus. Not bad for a first try, I don’t think.

Oh, and by the way, Wayne won his race. Way to go, Wayne!