RC Car Photography - Indoors

[Chris Green]

Hello,

I'm gonna have a go at photographing some rc car racing tonight, indoors, in fairly low-light conditions.

has anyone got any advice? I'm thiking I'll need to push the ISO up a bit to keep shutter speed up.

Is the standard flash a good idea? or is this a no-go?

Thanks!

Chris.

[foodpoison]

standard flash is fine. If i had no other option, that's what I'd use.

In an ideal world, you'd have a 580exII on an off camera stand somewhere around you with a set of pocketwizards!

[dking99]

Try "panning" shots....blur the background while the subject car is sharp!

[flick5848]

I have done a bit of this in the past and I found it best to manually focus on a section of the track and snap them as they come into focus. They move so fast and are so small it is very difficult to track them with AF.

Good luck and have fun

[inaneredstripe]

they are a lot quicker than you realise. we used to do some racing.
tend to agree with the "focus on a piece of track" suggestion.
flash would maybe help. freezes the action and lights the subject. picks up the nice paintjobs too.
so how did it go?
any pickies yet?

[gazedd]

I have never photographed them but i have obviously played about with them and they are very nippy, espeasilly the pro/Race ones. I'd manually focus a few laps, and review the pictures to see how they are stright away on screen...

Also, they sometimes build jumps depending on what type of RC car it is, these are excellent oppertunities for pictures.

[mole2k]

A lot of it depends on the hall as halls can go from quite well lit to very badly lit. I generally find myself shooting around iso1600 when im shooting the rc cars you will need to do a lot of panning as quite often you wont get the shutter speed up that high.

Flash is an option but i've never been a fan of people using it while i've been racing so I dont use it myself, if you are going to use a flash you would be best to have a CTO gel on it to help balance the temperature to the ambient light in the hall as this will allow you to use the ambient light to fill in the background so you dont get shots which are solely lit by the flash.

Here's a few examples of ones i've taken before. Mostly manually focused on a point then the picture taken with the exception of a few panning shots.

#1
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2318/2163248962_ec2a9b786d_o.jpg

#2
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2230/2162447767_ce3d86b620_o.jpg

#3
http://www.mole2k.co.uk/gallery/albums/userpics/10001/IMG_8746_small.jpg

[mole2k]

double post

[G-Kenny]

ha ha stephen they were taken two years ago, that was a good meeting,

thats me in the top photo

[mole2k]

ha ha stephen they were taken two years ago, that was a good meeting,

thats me in the top photo

Yeah I havnt taken many rc shots recently, the bottom one's even older :P

[Chris Green]

Well, after Friday nights attempt, I think I'll stick to racing them, not snapping them.

Thanks for the advice though guys. I was trying to photograph 1-18th Scale Micro's (The class that I also race in). One of the smallest scales available.

[mole2k]

1/18th would be probably the hardest scale to photograph out of all of them!