Aside from just putting up with them, I found 2 ways of dealing with the fences - either wander around and end up somewhere you shouldn't (I spent over 2 hours stood behind the red and white tyre barrier in picture 7, before race control spotted me and moved me on) - in my case, I wondered what the views were like of the new loop from the inside of the circuit, so I crossed the bridge on Hanger Straight and ended up there. The other way is to try and incorperate the fences into you composition - tricky to do well, but it works if you can pull it off.
I was looking forward to seeing your pictures from the weekend, to see how what you saw differed to what I saw in the same scene, and also how you dealt with the overcast times, as that's what I found harder to deal with than the fences - the grey sky + grey track + grey runoff +, at times, grey car just sucked the colour out of everything. There's one or two pictures I wish I'd have thought of, but hey, always learning, right?
You must have been somewhere you shouldn't to get the shot of the start of the GT1 qualifying race? All those grandstands were out of bounds. In theory.
I'm no expert, but my favourites of yours were all in the Flickr album, although personally 👍 for the Sumo images posted here.
Hm, I personally didn't want to wander to the disallowed areas (plus having a whole family there with me would have probably meant I would have been spotted quite quickly) so I tended to just either shoot through it or aim for small areas where the fence wasn't there. That's a pretty insane place to stand actually, I'm surprised the marshalls didn't spot you seeming, you were essentially right next to them. I must admit I did find some gaps in the fence, such as around the bottom of Arena (the other end to where you were) was a small marshalling area which had no fence, there were tonnes of photographers around there so I thought I'd join in and shoot through this relatively large gap. Then I moved along a bit to be almost at the grandstand but just shoved my lens through the gaps in the fence which worked. I did try and incoporate the fence in a couple of shots, although I think I binned them all apart from one which I'm still undecided on.
I actually was in a grandstand that was open to the public, on the formation lap me and my Uncle pretty much ran from Luffield to the nearest grandstand that was open along the straight (so we passed all of Woodcote etc) and there was one grandstand just before Copse corner's grandstand that we went in. Simply because if we hadn't gone in that one we would have missed the start. I would have preferred to be in the Copse one though, it gives a better straight on view down to the start (similar position to the one for the start of the GT3 race as seen on my Flickr).
I personally didn't really have an issue with the slightly overcast times, I just had to adjust my shutter speed (or ISO depending on what I was doing) to make sure the cars were sharp. To be honest the main issue I thought was that the track just looked bland in quite a lot of areas, with no greenery being around aside the old areas of the track. Infact the group I went with agreed that it didn't remind us of a British track, it reminded us of one of those new Abu Dhabi type tracks with the mixture of sandy colours. Of course it didn't help that the track wasn't finished (and won't be for some time judging by the building works going on down near Club).
Yeah, as I said I'm pretty useless at picking the best ones, infact the ones I showed over at Talk Photography were probably better than the ones here but it's always hard to intepret how well the photos will go down with people, I tend to pick just a few of my personal favourites and couple for variation (different angles) but I knew that over at Talk Photography they can be a bit picky in terms of PP, for example they weren't too keen on the PP used on some of Cadwell Park photos from last year. So I adjusted the set I showed for them, although I've had no replies yet. And cheers for the comments, especially on the SUMO's I really liked them for some reason, must be the fact it was a British team 👍
Number 1 and 3 are my favourites here, nicely framed and the colours work well. I'd like to of seen Number 9 a little wider though.
I'm interested in your experience of Silverstone though because I'm also paying my first visit soon to the Silverstone Classic weekend.
Cheers, I've had a couple of people say about those two particular shots already (on Facebook
). Number 9 was actually taken on the widest angle that my lens could do, although I could have stepped back. But I wanted to try something different with the pit paddock type shots, I usually do the thing of trying to incoporate both cars into the shot but just tried something else. It's ok though that it didn't really work, I'll know for next time. 👍
Silverstone is nice, it's relatively large track and (if you can shoot through the fence or find gaps) there are large opportunities for various different angled shots. One thing I would say is that you'll need a relatively large lens, I found my 55-250mm a little lacking in quite a few areas mainly Luffield, Copse, and even around near Maggotts and Becketts (on the outside of the track not the bit with the grandstand) some could even say Arena really. The track might be more finished than when we visited, as a lot of the grandstands weren't complete so this might open up new angles which we didn't have the chance to get. Anyway, I guess you can get my impression of Silverstone by reading the comments above and in answer to Roo's comment.
Even still, despite having some probelms at Silverstone I still enjoyed it, and might even be going back later on this year for Le Mans series. Perhaps. We'll see what happens
I remember seeing about that at the time actually, and thanks! I felt as if I learnt how to deal with fence quite a bit so it was kind of a learning curve. Although quite a steep one 
👍
