IS on or off ?

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Hi, I went to Cadwell for a "Track Day" my 1st time taking photos of anything moving , and i had help setting my camera up correctly but pics not are not very good ie; background in focus and cars out of focus ,:shrug: , should i have switched my IS off ? ( the IS is on the camera), i did at least manage to get the cars in the centre of the photos , but of course they are no good .:shake:
 
Did you pan the camera following the cars or just snap?
You should still be able to pan horizontally with IS on.
 
For motorsport you need to enable continuous focus mode, so the camera is constantly adjusting focus, select a single focus point rather than letting camera decide, and track the motion of the car smoothly all the time.

A car moving at 100mph covers almost 45 metres per second, and during the course of a normal exposure at say 1/320, the car will move about 14cm...

However, given the option, a high proportion of people will deactivate IS for motorsport as it can confuse panning shots, or at least put the IS system into a panning mode.
 
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Did you pan the camera following the cars or just snap?
You should still be able to pan horizontally with IS on.


Hi, Yes i was panning and following the the cars , thought i was doing every thing right .lol


For motorsport you need to enable continuous focus mode, so the camera is constantly adjusting focus, select a single focus point rather than letting camera decide, and track the motion of the car smoothly all the time.

A car moving at 100mph covers almost 45 metres per second, and during the course of a normal exposure at say 1/320, the car will move about 14cm...

However, given the option, a high proportion of people will deactivate IS for motorsport as it can confuse panning shots, or at least put the IS system into a panning mode.

Yes i understand what you are saying , i must try and get more conversant with my camera controls , i will go again in a few weeks and try and get it right .
Thank very much for your replies . :thankyou:
 
If the background is sharp, it sounds like the main problem is that you got the focus wrong and the AF has not locked on to the car. That's user error, either because you didn't keep the focus point on the car at all times, or you selected the wrong focusing point/s or mode to start with.

When in doubt, I would use centre point AF with servo tracking, at least you always know where you are with that. But other settings may be more appropriate according to circumstances and depending on what options your camera offers.

The speed of the car doesn't matter as such, because you are panning that and therefore be effectively stationary. It's the background that whizzing past, which is good because the blur gives an impression of speed. The amount of blur is controlled by the shutter speed, which you have to balance with other considerations, including camera shake.

I'm not familar with Olympus' IS but the normal regime is to switch the IS to horizontal panning mode (if you have one) where it will attempt to correct vertical movement of the camera, but will not try to correct the horizontal panning action which is of course deliberate.
 
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