Nikon cameras are speed demons when needed, thanks

I'm afraid that I'm an 'old school' photographer. I purchased my first camera whilst still at school using money saved from my Saturday job.

Of course as this was over 50 years ago that camera had to be loaded with film... 24 or 36 pics on a roll.

So I learnt that each press of the shutter had to be considered and not wasted. Also there was an additional cost to every shot as a film had to then be processed. That was more money out of my pocket!

I suppose that discipline got to be a habit and now that I take sports pics for a living I cannot break this habit of a lifetime of carefully firing off the shutter.

But modern day digital photography has brought many benefits and many advances that make our job so much easier. Think autofocus, fast and limit-less shutter rates and no film costs to name a couple.

I'd be silly not to take advantage of these improvements but I still can't get my finger into trigger happy mode. In fact I often dial down the maximum shutter rate as I get really annoyed if I take too many pics on a single press of the button, easy to do at fourteen frames a second! I like to try and capture just the peak moment and nothing more, however I'm sure that sometimes this means I do miss a shot!

Luckily those 50 years of taking pics sometimes helps with judging when maximum speed might be needed and Autocross racing is one of those times. It does mean that the number of shots I take during a meeting can run into a couple of hundred but that is the price to pay for being ready when something dramatic happens right in front of me.

That situation occured today at the Autocross racing on Chouet beach. Jade Ferbrache, who is well known for her skills riding large powerful bikes on tarmac, paid the price of pushing her car to the limit on a rutted sandy track. As she entered the pits corner her car launched into a massive double roll-over. Jade was wearing a neck brace and soon emerged from her slightly crumpled car unhurt.

So there we have it. Jade has added another roll-over 'notch' to her seatbelt and she now has a few pics to show the grandchildren one day!

In case you are wondering, I missed the very first moment of the roll but thanks to my modern Nikon digital camera I still got a sequence of 28 pics... that's more than I'd have got on a new roll of film! Maybe it's about time that this 'old school' photographer embraced everything that Digital photography brings to the kit bag... including the huge amount of pics it offers?

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