It's all about speed!

8 Aug 2005

When it comes to motor racing photography it really IS all about speed. The speed of the cars, the speed of your camera and your lens, shutter speed, even the speed of your reactions. But very often the feeling of speed is decidedly lacking in the end result ... your photos. If you don't pay attention to what your camera is doing, if you aren't deliberately selecting settings so as to retain that feeling of speed in your shots, well you might as well go out into the carpark and shoot the parked cars. They're a lot easier to shoot and you'll get about the same feeling of movement in your photos!

Too harsh? Maybe, but I've seen far too many photos of racing cars that look as if they were stopped out on the circuit rather than belting around it at high speed. And what's the point in that? It's not all that difficult to retain a dynamic element in your shots and it will add significantly to the quality of the end result if you shoot with this aim in mind.

First let's just clarify just WHY your photos look static. The most likely cause is the use of too fast a shutter speed. Most cameras, even digital SLRs have programme modes that pre-set the various camera settings to help you take good shots in a given situation. Virtually all of these cameras offer a Sports Programme Mode. Sports Mode's primary purpose is to set the shutter speed of your camera high enough to freeze the motion in the frame, somewhere around1/1000th second or faster. Great! Or maybe not. For most sports a high shutter speed is probably desirable, stop the ball in the air or the swimmer in mid stroke. But for our purposes, a frozen racing car will always look stationery. And that's not good.

So, the first thing to do is switch to Shutter Priority Mode which puts YOU firmly in control of the shutter speed the camera uses. Turn this down a bit. Start at about 1/500th second and move downwards. What you want to achieve is a situation where the car is still sharp and frozen, but the wheels are in motion, and therefore blurred. This is possible because the rotation speed of the wheels is greater than the forward motion of the car. I'm sure someone with better Physics education than me could explain it better, but it will do. All you need to know is that you want a shutter speed that will retain movement in the wheels while freezing the car itself.

The exact shutter speed will vary depending on the size of the car in the frame and the speed it is doing, so you will need to arrive at the speed yourself. There is no definitive number.

If you are panning the camera to match the movement of the car, you can reduce the shutter speed quite a lot. Sharp results can be had at 1/100th second if your technique is right. And even lower if your camera has image stabilisation. These kind of speeds give your shot an even more dynamic feeling of speed as the background becomes blurred and streaky too. Wonderful!

Happy shooting!

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