June 5, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Vaughn Gittin Jr. battles Daijiro Yoshihara in the 2010 Formula Drift Round 3 final.

For this year’s Formula Drift race at Wall, NJ I was privileged to be shooting for two publications. After a lot of fun down in Atlanta, AutoImportCraze asked me to keep the streak alive and provide shots from the other East coast event on the calendar. You can check out the full gallery of shots here: http://www.autoimportcraze.com/coverage2.php?menu=3&Warn=0&ShowID=561&car=1.

June 5, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Yoshihara, Gittin, and Foust (middle, left, right) made up this year's podium for the 2010 Formula Drift Round 3 event.

The other publication was Drifted.com. I was contacted by Alex Quail not long before the race, and asked to provide not only photos but also editorial coverage. I enjoy writing about motorsports almost as much as photographing it (hence this blog), so it was a no brainer to hop on board as a contributor.

I crafted six posts going over the whole weekend, and adding a few words of praise for APEX’i/Hankook driver Ryuji Miki. A link to each is below.

1. Welcome to Wall
2. Qualifying Results
3. Ryuji Miki’s Past Rides
4. Ryuji Miki’s New Lexus SC Drift Car
5. The Main Event
6. Crash Still-frame Video

Be sure to browse the rest of the site and show them some love in the comments. Alex and Jord have assembled a great crew of photographers and film makers from around the world. I am honored to add to the USA perspective.

Click past the jump for a few more of my favorites from the weekend.

June 4, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Ryan Tuerck takes a practice run in his Pontiac Solstice GXP drift car.

June 4, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Ken Gushi duels with Conrad Grunewald as the sun sets over the track at Wall.

June 5, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Rhys Millen tries to keep up with Samuel Hubinette's Challenger around the figure eight Wall Speedway circuit.

June 5, 2010. Wall, New Jersey. Darren McNamara sliding the tail of his Falken Tires Saturn Sky drift car.

As mentioned in my From the Archive post a few weeks ago, I was recently down in Braselton for this year’s Formula Drift event at Road Atlanta. My coverage is up now at Auto Import Craze, so be sure to head over there to see the full set. Below are a few of my favorite shots from the weekend, but I plan to put up others in the coming days, including a behind the lens how-to post. As McNally would say, more tk…

Astute readers will recognize the angle used for this shot of Samuel Hubinette and Darren McNamara. Did I nail it like I planned?

I must confess, I’m a fan of RX-7s, and Ryuji Miki’s FD is no exception. The new-age Hankook livery is also very cool.

Later on, Miki got the car a little bit off track, and managed to rip off parts of his front splitter and rear bumper/quarter panel. In the shot below his rear fender conveniently caught some air and was lifted up, exposing the full tire so I could see the whole thing being cooked. Makes me wish some of these guys ran without fenders on purpose.

Speaking of burning Hankook rubber, Robbie Nishida debuted the team’s new Nissan GT-R in Atlanta. You may be wondering how a car that is normally all about grip with a stunning AWD system can pull off that kind of drift. Under its skin resides the same engine and drivetrain that he ran last year in a 350Z. Hankook has plans to keep tuning the car’s original motor and play with the diff in the AWD setup to put the power down in the rear, but for now Robbie looked right at home in the longer bodied Nissan.

Flames erupting from tailpipes are not a common sight in drifting the way they are in other forms of motorsport. That hasn’t stopped Matt Waldin from letting his 350Z run a bit rich though.

Ken Gushi is in his third season running a Scion tC that has been converted to RWD. It’s also his third livery, and probably my personal favorite to date – though I wish they had kept the fierce red halo headlights from last year. He put on a strong showing in Atlanta, and I expect bigger things from him in New Jersey where he placed 4th in 2009.

Normally I don’t photograph drifting with this slow of a shutter. It exaggerates the motion, and in reality the cars are not moving this fast. Every now and then it can be fun to mix things up though, so I’m glad that I experimented when Matt Powers was doing his final qualifying run.

Aside from the angle in the second shot above, this a view from my favorite area at Road Atlanta to photograph the tandem battles. It positions the cars close together in the frame (and in reality), while keeping a good view of the fans in the background. Below, Tyler McQuarrie puts pressure on Forrest Wang’s G35.

Having said that, there is another location from which I’ve always wanted to get shots in Atlanta. Below is an example of what happens when I can be in two places at once. I set up another camera in harms way only a few feet from the screeching racers. Luckily, my camera lived to tell the tale. I’ll share how it was done from the technical side of things later on.

Tanner Foust and Matt Waldin go at it in the first round of 32. Engine trouble caused Matt to retire, and allow Tanner to move on to the top 16…

…where he would face his Scion brother Ken Gushi. Gushi edged out the win in that round, so Tanner will have to wait another year before he challenge for a podium in Atlanta.

I won’t go through what happened in the entire main event’s battles (that’s what the Auto Import Craze coverage is for), but suffice to say that Dai Yoshihara in the Falken S13 was on a roll. In the top 8, he had contact with Darren McNamara’s Saturn Sky, and lost his whole rear bumper. This meant that the trunk and rear wing could no longer be supported, so his car was converted to something that more closely resembled an El Camino. The lack of rear downforce didn’t seem to make a different though as he continued to light up the tires nicely.

I enjoy photographing the podium for each race. I like the emotion that the drivers have built up and how they let it all out ceremoniously with the champagne spray. I wanted to do something different this time, so I went around to the side instead of straight on to photograph the uncorking. Unfortunately JR turned away from me, so I only got his back, but I still like the way the lights caught all of the liquid in mid-air as he and Forsberg doused the winner.

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this set. Be sure to leave some comments after the fold to let me know what you think of them.