Veteran car approaching Crawley High Street, November 2008

What great timing!  Buy a new camera on Friday and then on Sunday 500 photogenic veteran cars pass within a few hundred metres of home.  Some years I forget that the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run is happening: this year I made sure to catch it.

Although the cars come very close to home I went into town first, but I wish I hadn’t.  It gets so crowded down there.  There is a lot to see, and the Ifield scouts and others are knocking up some tempting food, but I was just interested trying out the new camera so I took a few snaps then came back home and walked up to the top of Pease Pottage Hill, which is a much better place to be.

1903 Crestmobile struggling up Pease Pottage Hill, November 2008

It gave me a chance to try out the telephoto lens which was cool.  I had taken it down to the town centre with me but forgot to take the dust cover for the normal lens, and I was not going to shove it in my pocket unprotected.  Unfortunately the telephoto does not have image stabilisation on it, but the results didn’t come out too bad.  Just have to remember to be well braced when using it – or take the tripod with me.

One reason why it is a good place to be is that the cars are all going pretty slowly up the hill, and the grass verges are littered with cars that couldn’t quite make it, waiting for the police, RAC or friends to come along and push, tow, or repair them.  I know how they feel: a lot of the drivers get out and push at about the same point on the hill as I do when I am on the bicycle.

I am very pleased with the telephoto lens.  Quite often there was a veteran car heading up a queue, with a lot of space in front of them.  I was able to stand in the road get some head-on pictures quite close up without having to worry about getting run over.

I couldn’t believe it when I came home and found that I had taken over 80 pictures.  It doesn’t sound like many, but in the past I have come home from a fortnight’s holiday with fewer photos.  Even after deleting the real disasters there are nearly 60 pictures remaining.

Total disasters?   I didn’t fork out a small fortune (by my standards) to have total disasters…  but its all a learning experience and I have now learned to remember to change the setting from manual to autofocus before I start snapping. I also learned to pay more attention to which of the autofocus points is being used.  Other than that I’m very pleased with the results which I am going to spend ages loading them on Flickr.