Welcome back to the Rolex 24 Hour-by-Hour series. It’s now Hour 3 of the race. Thanks to the steady few who’ve been reading every update. If you like the content, consider sharing it with your friends!
You know the drill by now: one hour, ten photos, all captured from the fan side of the fence. No credentials, no media center. Hour 2 took us from the infield horseshoe to the steep banking of NASCAR 1 and 2. I fought harsh shadows, territorial campers, and fences, yet still came away with one of my favorite shots of the weekend.
For those of you new here: hi, I’m Aiden. This series is my way of reliving my (very long) day at the 2025 Rolex 24. I’ve been sharing a condensed version of these posts on Instagram, but here is where I share the whole story, with behind-the-scenes notes, missed shots, technical breakdowns, and a lot of personal rambling.
Hour 3: The Shores of Lake Lloyd
3:40PM - 4:40PM
We didn’t spend much time actually shooting during hour 3. Our plan was to return to the car at some point prior to sunset to top off water and snacks, and to grab my film gear for golden hour. A yellow flag at 3:48PM – less than 10 minutes into the hour – had us packing up earlier than expected to take advantage of the break in the action.
Lake Lloyd might be one of my favorite spots at the track. It's the furthest away from the track, so it’s one of the only times you can remove your headphones without risking permanent hearing damage. The photos here are amazing – long pans with vibrant backgrounds and a creamy foreground. At night, you can get some great reflections off the water, too. When you’re not taking pictures, this is one of the best spots for on-track action. As a bonus, you can often find people fishing here, which I think is hilarious.
The Shores felt different this year. Normally, the cool breeze off the lake provides some reprieve from the hot asphalt of the infield, but with temperatures in the mid-50s during Hour 3, that same breeze was now biting through our hoodies – a stark contrast to the 80s we were experiencing this time last year. Scrap wood had been piled along the eastern side of the lake, and a U-Haul truck was inexplicably parked nearby, obscuring the track in my photos. I did my best to work around those obstacles, but their very existence irked me.
Photo-by-photo commentary is going to be sparse today. We only shot for 8 minutes during the whole hour. That’s the drawback of this series. It’s retrospective, so hours like this just happen sometimes. When I’m on track, I’m more focused on getting the photos I need and being efficient with my time.
1: I started this hour off strong with this capture of the #9 Pfaff Lamborghini, #32 Korthoff Preston Mercedes, and #96 Turner BMW going three wide into the braking zone of the bus stop – sorry, LeMans Chicane (It will forever be the bus stop to me). These battles are my favorite part of this spot. Watching the cars fly down the back stretch towards the braking zone, daring the other to brake later, seeing who has the bigger balls. It's exhilarating. Year after year, I come back, and I always make sure to spend time just enjoying the moment. Most people need binoculars to see the track across the lake, but the 500mm lens is basically the same thing, and as a bonus, I get to take my memories home with me.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:40:48PM
2: Whenever I’m at Daytona, I try to experiment with variations of this photo at a few different spots along the lake. Sometimes I’ll set up to the left (by the pier) to get more of the chicane and braking; other times I’m further right for the banners. This year, we split the difference and made camp beneath the palm trees between those two spots. Specifically, we picked the grassy outcrop with a pair of trees side by side, not the ones with the trio. This location strikes the sweet spot, giving a nice side shot of the car with the colorful banners in the background, while also putting us off of the walking path and out of the way of pedestrians.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:41:10PM
3: One of my personal projects whenever I’m on the lake is matching the banner to the car. Normally, this means trying to match the colors between the two. In this case, the greens and blues of the Advent Health banner are similar to the Cetilar Racing #47 Ferrari. This matching game helps give the photo a much cleaner, more intentional look.
Settings: 1/40s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:42:29PM
4: Shots as sharp as this are rare here. My standard technique involves mounting the 500mm to its monopod, steadying my breathing, and tracking the car as it flies by. Because the cars are going parallel to me, I don’t need autofocus. Instead, I use my focus point as a panning aid. I’ll pick a point on the car (usually the mirror, windshield, or number plate) and attempt to keep it within the focus point. Even though they’re near top speed on the back stretch, the distance means I’m not panning very quickly. That makes any vertical microvibrations much more noticeable in the final image
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:42:47PM
5: While we were here by the lake, I pulled out my GoPro to capture some b-roll content for my vlog. I plan on releasing that on YouTube (eventually). I have quite the backlog to make it through first. I tend to mount my GoPro in the camera’s hot shoe for a true POV shot of my panning in action. The combo of the monopod and 500mm already had plenty of heft, so the extra weight of the GoPro was unnoticeable. With the sun at my back and my hat on backwards, I didn’t need to worry about the brim hitting the action cam and knocking it off.
As a side note, this is the other type of matching I attempt to do. If I’m not matching the colors, then I’m matching the content. In this case, it’s the #91 Trackhouse Corvette with the Chevrolet sign.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:44:42PM
6: This is the result of the only time I dramatically changed my shutter speeds during the hour. It didn’t turn out well. The car isn’t sharp, and the banners blur to the point of being a distraction, not an enhancement. I can think of two reasons I might have done this, but I don’t know which one was in the moment.
1) The light boxes on the inside of the track were starting to frustrate me. They sit between me and the cars, causing the cars to disappear mid-pan, ruining several photos that were otherwise great. I may have slowed down my shutter speed to blur the boxes enough that the cars were visible through the obstruction, similar to what I do with fences.
2) I have a method where if I’m not getting enough sharp photos, I halve the shutter speed – making 1/40 into 1/20 (or in this case, 1/15). The slower speed forces me to be more stable. After doing 2-3 minutes at that speed, I go back to the original. Suddenly, I find it much easier to get sharp photos because my mind and body are tuned into the precision that the slower speed requires.
Settings: 1/15s | 500mm | ƒ/20 | ISO 100 | 3:45:05PM
7: Most of my compositions at this spot this year wound up having the car on the lower-right third of the frame. It was the only framing that felt natural in the moment. This is one of the few that didn’t. Last year, I captured a centered shot of a red Ferrari on the Sunoco banner, but that was by using my 200mm and cropping. As you can see, when I’m using the 500mm, the banners fill the entire frame. This means I can only get one or two banners in frame, requiring me to be much more precise with my shooting.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/14 | ISO 100 | 3:46:43PM
8: Back to watching passes happen. It’s interesting how much later the GTPs brake on a push lap vs a conservation lap. When they’re conserving energy, they stop alongside the GT3s, but when pushing, they blow past and brake 30-40 feet deeper, carrying probably 10-15mph more through the chicane.
I like the hint of water in this one. At night, I compose my shots with a lot of water in frame to catch the reflections. During the day, I’m angled upwards to get the banners instead. At HSR, I tried using the 2x TC with the 500mm to make a 1000mm monster, but it was too long to be usable. The backgrounds lost the colors from the banner, and the foreground lost the water, causing the spot to lose what makes it special.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:47:05PM
9: You’ll notice that most of my shots have a slight skew to them, where vertical objects are tilted ever so slightly to the left. This is the result of the rolling shutter effect. Since I use the electronic shutter on my R6ii instead of the mechanical shutter, my shots have a slight slant. If I use the mechanical shutter, I’m forced to drop from 20fps down to 12fps, and since I don’t use an OEM battery (I can’t afford $70 for a battery), I’m limited further to 8-9 fps. I also really struggle with the viewfinder blackout when using the mechanical shutter. It's not natural the way a DSLR is, so I feel like I lose framing more easily. Therefore, I choose to have the slightly ugly rolling shutter slant rather than risk missing the shot entirely – either by losing the car or failing to get my timing right.
Looking back at my photos, I felt like the skew wasn’t noticeable until shot 5. A quick check with ExifTool shows that shots 1-4 did indeed use the mechanical shutter, and shots 6-10 were using the electronic shutter. This is most apparent in shot 4. Notice the border between the red and black banners and compare that to shot 5 with the border between the blue and black banners. In 4 the border is perfectly vertical, if not slightly right skewed, but in 5, the skew is very aggressively left. In shot 2 the effect is also recognizable. The catch fence poles in the foreground of 2 are perpendicular to the ground, but in every shot after 4 they’re skewed leftward.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:48:07PM
10: The last of the matches. This time, I lined up the red, white, and blue #60 Acura between the red and blue banners of Axalta and Sunoco. This one works especially well due to the livery of the #60 having more red in the front and blue along the rear.
Settings: 1/30s | 500mm | ƒ/16 | ISO 100 | 3:48:43PM
I wish I had more to say, but I’ve entirely run out of things to say to pad an hour where we only spent 8 minutes actually shooting.
Photos 4, 6, 7, and 10 are the BMAC Exclusives today.
GF: Yay lake time! I was excited to actually be able to shoot at the lake because when we had come to the Historic 24H race in October 2024, lake side was so full of mosquitos we didnt dare shoot anything like this. I struggled quite a bit to be comfortable shooting here because it was so far away, but it was a fun challenge to keep at it and I was really happy with how this shot turned out in the end. I focused a lot on trying to center a car under one of the banners, and got decently close with Rexy. Not included in these pictures are my first attempts as whip-pans because I did end up getting bored.
Settings: 1/40s | 70-200mm @ 182mm | ƒ/9 | ISO100 | 3:41:32PM
Aiden’s addition: Jackie does bring a good point. The mosquitoes at HSR were insane. Our combined lake time over the 4 days at HSR was less than the time we spent this hour of Rolex, which did disappoint me because I loved the classic cars screaming down the back stretch. Also of note, you can see how straight her vertical lines are, because she’s using a DSLR with a 100% mechanical shutter, so rolling shutter is pretty much non-existent.
Sorry for the boring hour. We packed up early because the safety car came out. We planned to shoot here for a little while, maybe try out a few different lake spots, and then return to the rental, but the first safety car of the race came out and threw off our plan. This location sucks when the cars are slow, so we called an audible and wrapped up early.
What I do not understand is how we managed to lose over an hour between leaving the lake and starting at our next location. It's a 10-minute walk to the car at our infield parking, and a 10-minute walk to the next spot. Even if it took us 20 minutes to grab my film gear and eat a snack, that still leaves 20 minutes unaccounted for. I don’t think I took a nap, so I must have just zoned out for a bit or something. I guess time flies by when you finally take your first break after 3 hours of shooting.
Hour 3 – By the Numbers
Race Conditions:
Temp: 55º | Cautions: 1 | Retirements: 1
Miles Walked: 3.92mi (Total) / 0.79mi (This Hour)
Hourly Shooting Breakdown:
579 Photos Taken | 69 Keepers | 11.91% Keeper Rate
Most Photographed Car: #11 TDS Racing (LMP2) - 5 Shots
Cumulative Photo Stats:
2,959 Photos Taken | 537 Keepers | 18.14% Keeper Rate
Most Photographed Car: #77 AO Racing (GTD Pro) - 35 Shots
I’ve been playing with the formatting and headings of this recap section. What do you guys think of this one?
I know I said in the last update that I’d be pushing these posts out every 4 days, but I decided to slow down my release schedule and ship them once a week or so. I’m currently targeting a release every 6 days, but given my job doesn't have a set schedule (#realtorlife), I might have delays some weeks. The slower release schedule gives me more time to create quality content. Trying to pump out these posts every 4 days was too much, given the amount of writing I’m doing here. Each edition is essentially a 5-6 page essay, complete with full research from the IMSA timing pages, my video archives, and random websites that I pull stats from. And that doesn’t include the time spent sorting the photos, selecting the top 10, and then editing them either. It came down to either releasing sub-par content with shorter captions or extending the release schedule, and like I said last week, I prioritize quality over quantity every time.