Hello Hooked -- I'm returning to the RC hobby, and I have gotten into 1/10 touring car racing. I run at "The Track" in Gaithersburg, MD, and it's also carpet, but a road course. It's addictive! In fact, I just got back from practice and had to check my DPC score. :)
Regarding the stop action, there are two things that are key: sensativity and light. Cranking the ISO up on your camera (if you have that control) will improve stop-action at the cost of grain.
Stop action takes LOTS of light in order to get a fast shutter speed. An external flash will help out quite a bit. Your camera may not be able to use one directly -- i.e. no hot shoe and no flash sync port -- but you can still get an auxiliary flash to fire using an "optically triggered" slave flash. You'd use the on-camera flash to trigger the slave.
There are two ways to get an optical slave: use a flash unit that has optical slave capability built right in (my Sigma EF500 Super DG has this, and it's really sweet -- they're under $200) or buy a slave trigger, which is a device that plugs into the flash's synch port and triggers it when it "sees" the master flash. The latter is good when you have an older flash and want to keep using it -- it's cheaper than buying a whole new flash.
Definitely consult your users manual about how your camera meters it's flash exposure. If it's the Canon E-TTL, it fires a pre-flash to measure and adjust the intensity of the actual flash, but this pre-flash confuses older slaves. This affects the type of slave you buy -- single-flash slaves are about $30, but E-TTL-compatible slaves cost $70. BTW, this is NOT red-eye redution -- totally different kind of pre-flash. |
