Drag Racing

[bobski1]

Sunday Service this week at Santa Pod,

Any tips for a novice wanting to shoot some drag racing

[Simpo Two]

Practice panning and the effect of different shutter speeds on motion blur.

[Ledaig]

And try with different distances - the closer you are the faster you will have to pan.

Sometimes it pays to be a little further back up the bank/stand and use a longer reach.

You can also try using manual focus and set it to the point on the track where the you press the shutter button and take the pic as the car passes,

[weeboot]

bounce over to the drag racing subforum of PH...

[Turn7]

I tend to use 125th for panning the faster stuff.
Use servo focus and check results from there.
The cars won't be pulling mega 60 foot times at this meet so you may need to play around .

[corozin]

A couple of thoughts :

- If you are near the startline trying to get shots of burnouts set the shutter speed up high as you can without getting too much noise. With these shots the smoke (and sometimes flames) are the impressive bit of the result and that stuff moves quickly in a burnout.

- If you are 100-250 yds down the track you can slow the shot down to get some impression of speed (wheel blur etc) but accurate tracking is essential. I wouldn't recommend going below 1/125 to 1/160 for these.

- If you have a longish lens don't be afraid to go down the track to near the finish line; this will make it easier to photograph both cars racing, makes tracking them a lot easier and gives surprisingly good results. If you are shooting fast dragsters, then again use the fastest shutter you can get away with as exhaust flames etc are the juice with these. For Top Fuel dragsters I am often at 1/4000 or faster.

HTH -

Edited by corozin on Friday 5th May 18:42