Once again I would like to thank Andy for the invite as an OP for this event, had a blast! Sorry I couldn’t make it for the last day (Sunday) as I was too tired from Friday and Saturday. I would also like to thank CC for the taking on the job as a translator/interpreter between us.

The crowd was enormous that Friday night during the official launching.

There was a lot of ground to cover and the heat (36 Celsius) did not make it any easier. On the plus side at least sky was clear and clean unlike KL.

Yes, it definite that the crowd was only waiting for one thing, the Super GT ambassadors Yuuki Sana and Nana Shibata!

That weekend, we had a horrible battle of white balances due to the endless changes of stage light color which made getting the right color from each shot right off the camera setting a very difficult task. At one point I really which I had packed my Fujifilm s5 pro instead, would have had a much easier time instead of guessing. Tip here, there are another ways to combat such situation but it relies on making some sacrifices,

1. Shoot Raw
so the white balance won’t be an issue at all since you can adjust in post. This is the safest bet if you don’t know how to deal with white balance and the Auto balance is unable to handle white balance at the time the shot was taken properly. The drawback of this method is that you’ll be wasting enormous amount of memory space and spending considerable amount of time in post.

2. Time the lights
In this method, you set your white balance to one specific light color and then take shots only when the color light you want comes on (this is only effective for ever changing stage lights). Drawback of this technique is that you may missed some important shots. Do not use this technique, I’m just listing it here. Instead just use the shoot raw method instead.

3. Use flash
This is the preferred method of event shooting especially if you’re working a night base event like I did. Set your white balance to flash and then use a flash but make sure your flash power is set correctly or else your shots will be overexposed or underexposed. Drawback of this method is that you need to be able to gauge the correct power level for your flash and no, ttl (Through The Lens) mode is only correct 40% of the time.

The final alternative is to shoot a high speed ISO film (not bloody likely) rated at say 1600. You can use ISO 800 but I wouldn’t recommend it, it might not be fast enough.

Anyway moving on here we have Sana and Nana (tapi mana Sini?)

The performance by the girls were great and after that there was lots of speeches by the bigshots (ZZZZzzzzzz -_-)

An interesting observation I noted was that Japanese don’t like Mushroom soup, I was informed of this by CC when the girls told him they find it a rather weird dish and avoided it. Although they did like the pizza hahahahaah XD.

And that’s how the first night ended. The next day we were task with covering the go cart race (yawn~~~~ -o-). It was rather boring.

I really like how this shot turned out it really captured the mood for me.