Chris, awesome photos!! Quick question. Do you carry out much cropping and rotating post production or is that exactly how you take your photos.
I usually try and frame the shot as I want it and tweak it later, was keen to know what your work flow was.
Generally I will crop a photo (usually only to tidy it up, nothing major), then adjust the levels. I always under-expose which is much safer than over-exposing, so I just bring the levels up a bit to brighten it up. Lately I've started experimenting with selective sharpening as well, again just a very minor tweak (with unsharp mask) and nothing agressive.
I've never rotated a photo at all, all that is done when capturing the image. In an ideal world I wouldn't crop either as I only have a 6mp camera and can't afford to lose much, but when a car is passing at 80mph it's not always easy to frame it precisely in camera.
Original straight from camera
Processed
As you can see, not a huge difference but certainly noticeable when I get prints done. 500 photos usually takes me about 2hrs max to download off the camera, sort through, process and upload to Smugmug.