Advice on first drag strip shooting tommorrow!

sduk

sduk

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Sammy
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Hi all, just wondering if anyone has any advice for me :D

Tommorow I am off to Crail Raceway for a Drift and 1/4 Mile Drag Thrash day and I'm taking my Sony A200 camera.

I have only had the it for a few weeks and am very much a begginer.

Does anyone have an advice on settings/shooting or anything else that would help me :D

Keep reading about panning and not even sure what that is :)

Please go easy on me and i might post up my best pics for you all to see :D

thanks

Sammy
 
Panning is just following your subject and keeping it in frame to get your image right or keep panning and shooting and hoping to get a good image.

I'm pretty sure it comes from something to do with panoramic but don't know for sure. I bet somebody will do on this forum.

As for settings. I'm assuming you want to freeze the action and have your background out of focus. So you'll want to have quite a fast shutter speed and quite a wide aperture. If your panning, slow down the shutter speed and close the aperture down a bit. Then if you can keep your subject in the same place you can get a nicely blurred background which gets you a very nice effect.

Hope I'm right on all that.
Tom N.
 
Just keep the shutter half depressed whilst focused on the action and press when you have a shot best thing is to start by half pressing when your subject is far away and once its nearly filled the frame shoot check what you have and alter the shutter and aperture accordingly:thumbs:

Dont forget to show us the pics here later:thumbs:
 
TommyPhoto said:
As for settings. I'm assuming you want to freeze the action and have your background out of focus. So you'll want to have quite a fast shutter speed and quite a wide aperture. If your panning, slow down the shutter speed and close the aperture down a bit. Then if you can keep your subject in the same place you can get a nicely blurred background which gets you a very nice effect.

Hope I'm right on all that.
Tom N.
Click to expand...

For motorsports you often don't want to completely freeze the action, you need the shutter speed to be slow enough to show some blur in the wheels otherwise the car will just look like it is parked!

Personally I would shoot in shutter priority and start at 1/500th second working down do somewhere between 1/125th and 1/200th.
1/500th is too fast but it is a good speed to start at to get your eye in. The slower you go the greater sense of speed you will achieve, but go slower than your ability allows and you will start to loose sharpness on the car.
 
I dont know much about photography but if you are talking dragsters they are very fast and not easy to pan. I found you get good pictures of the start and the burn out ( where they smoke the tyres to warm them up) if you sit at about 150 yards from the start.
 
thanks for your help, i wish i had asked sooner because some of that is all new to me, but i camera is charged and im now away to give it a shot!

really wish i knew someone local who could help when im there lol.

thats me away to the raceway now, will (maybe) put some pictures up when finished :D

im still very new at this and am never very happy with my finished results, everyone elses on here are always so good lol.

thanks for the replies, thats helped,

Sammy
 
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