night/Road rallying

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dionbee93

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Dion Bee
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hi guys, any of you on here been taking pictures of rally cars at night?
Do you have any sort of technique or style? (e.g. to take the car from a specific angle etc?)

If you have took any photos of rally cars at night, i would really appreciate it if you would post them on this thread so i can get a feel for it!

Any other recommendations are all welcome!

Cheers, Dion!
 
ok, thanks, didnt really know if rally photographers used this site, i thoguht taht there was maybe a dedicated site!

Thanks!

Dion
 
dionbee93 said:
ok, thanks, didnt really know if rally photographers used this site...
Click to expand...

There's a few of us rally photographers forming a lynch mob to come after you ;)

No, seriously though, have a look at my Flickr/Website, especially the Tour of Mull and RAC Rally photos for night-shots. Angle depends on where you shoot from, head-on is a bit disconcerting, firing your flash in the drivers face, front quarter or side are better...



 
I'm really surprised at the lack of response actually.

I do a little bit of rally stuff, and whilst I've done a bit at night, I've never deemed it to have been that successful, so I don't really think I'm in a position to offer you advice, but I will be watching to see what others suggest.

:D

EDIT: Previous post wasn't there when I began writing this :lol:
 
Night photographs can be tough. The biggest thing to avoid is just plonking a flashgun on top of your camera and take pictures which end up making the car look parked.

Here's a few of mine taken with various techniques, I mostly try to use available light like these. You'll need to mostly likely use the camera in manual to avoid the lights affecting the sensor either that or play around with exposure compensation a lot. I find manual that bit easier to figure out what shots you want when dealing with the headlights.








If it's very very dark and there is nothing to light the cars with you might have to use flash, to get motion you wont want to see the spokes as even a full power flash is 1/1000th sec so it's going to freeze the wheels. Most likely the flash will be 1/10,000 or faster.

This shot is lit by a flash either side of the car. I dont own two flashguns but thankfully the people machine gunning the cars from the inside of the corner meant it was mostly lit the whole way so I just tried to time my shots to the guy on the outside of the corner to get the entire car lit. This was one of the frames that came out. I guess if I was rich I could have flashguns setup on some pocket wizards to get more accurate results :p


A lot of it depends on the cars and their headlight setups. If they have the full spots all turned on you wont get a shot like my last one as the lights will just totally over-power the entire scene. You can then try things like long exposures to just get light trails. This would work better if you where higher up looking down at the stage, i've never tried that personally as night stages are quite rare here in Ireland.
 
thanks a lot for the tips, the other day on the way home from work my dad stopped so i tried a few shots and to get to grips with the flash gun and settings etc, and these are the best two from the bunch.
the car was moving about 35mph ish, i had it set on full flash but dont quite remember the speed i had set the shutter on!
It was pitch black (about 11pm on a back road with no street lights etc.)
Any pointers on they way forward from anyone would be very handy!

#1
221108073.jpg


#2
221108067-1.jpg


number 2 is my personal favourite, it has something 'road rally' about it!

Thanks to everyone that have replied and to those who are going to!

Dion!
 
The biggest issue with road rallying over stage rallying is that they mostly are just road cars so they dont look out of the ordinary so it's quite hard to get the atmosphere of a road rally, perhaps at an actual checkpoint you would get more of a feel for it with shots of the cars as they stop by the checkpoint.

I would probably try to get the camera up a bit above the checkpoint and do a long exposure so you have the headlight trails comming in then when the car stops/slows down fire off a few flashes either hand held or setup down near the cars to light the scene then then the car drives away the trails leave on the other side of the frame. You'll end up with the trails up to the car then a shot of the cars beside each other then the trails away. That would be a shot I would try and go for, last time I was at a road rally it was very wet and cold so I just stayed in the car and didn't take any shots :p
 
thats true, the only thing that differs them to a road car is the spots, cage etc. theyre not allowed any advertising!

Another thing i find difficlult is to set the flash and then get it to take good photos of bright coloured cars (whites and silvers) and then on the same setting, take good photos of dark cars (black and navies etc) i cant adjust it every time because:
a) i dont have time between cars
b)i dont know which car is coming next because they jumble up in a road rally!

Thanks for all your help up to now guys, keep the tips coming, im very greatful of it!

Dion!
 
A lot of top road rally togs will take a spot lamp with them on a stand run from a 12 volt car battery, point that into the road in the direction you are looking to shoot, manually focus on a point within the spotlight area. Wait for car to come take pic.

Make sure the wattage of the bulb isn't too high in the spotlamp as it will look like daylight, but bright enough that it will light car up, then no need to use flash, shoot at about 1/200 and you'll still get the motion in the wheels to show the car is moving.

Having spoken to a number of drivers that do road rallies or stage rallies in the dark and they say they are not put off by flash, as it is very quick and their eyes don't have time to adjust to it, so then they don't take time to adjust back to the dark. So if you haven't got the option above don't be scared to use flash.

Can't help with the use of flash because I just don't use it for taking pictures of moving cars. But just make sure it isn't too powerful that you end up blowing out certain parts of the car.

Brian Gilbert is a well known road rallying photographer.
http://www.bg-photosport.co.uk/
 
cheers rally-media, yes brian gilbert is a very good photographer, bought a few prints off him, quite good quality aswell!

Wouldn't the photos be a bit blurry if i only used a lamp and no flash?

Cheers,

Dion !
 
dionbee93 said:
cheers rally-media, yes brian gilbert is a very good photographer, bought a few prints off him, quite good quality aswell!

Wouldn't the photos be a bit blurry if i only used a lamp and no flash?

Cheers,

Dion !
Click to expand...


Don't really understand your question there?
If you panned the car then yes the background and wheels would be 'blurry' as you say but having the additional light will allow your camera to focus on the car.
 
ah, right ok, for some reason, i thought that if there was not a lot of light in dark 'moving' shots, the photo would be out of focus!

Thanks for that!

Dion
 
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