The picture is of racing at Bowman Gray race track in Winston-Salem, NC. It was part of the weekly Nascar series.
I practiced for the race by taking shots of cars going down the road in front of my house. However, taking shots of race cars moving at much higher speeds was quite a bit harder than shots of cars going 35 mph.
I experimented with different crops, but decided to go with one that was wide and not very tall to emphasize linear speed and all the horizontal lines in the photo. I took this picture with a Sigma 70-300mm 4-5.6 APO lens. As far as post shot adjustments, I cropped the picture in Photoshop, sharpened it a bit, and adjusted the contrast.
Statistics
Place: 8 out of 188 Avg (all users): 6.6266 Avg (commenters): 8.2000 Avg (participants): 6.6700 Avg (non-participants): 6.5940 Views since voting: 3108 Votes: 233 Comments: 31 Favorites: 3 (view)
by the way here is all the exif info, if anyone cares.
File Name
111_1194.JPG
Camera Model Name
Canon EOS 10D
Shooting Date/Time
6/28/2003 8:13:17 PM
Shooting Mode
Shutter Speed Priority AE
Tv( Shutter Speed )
1/30
Av( Aperture Value )
8.0
Metering Mode
Evaluative
Exposure Compensation
-1
ISO Speed
200
Lens
70.0 - 300.0 mm
Focal Length
149.0 mm
Image Size
3072x2048
Image Quality
Fine
Flash
Off
White Balance
Daylight
AF Mode
Manual Focus
Parameters
Contrast Normal
Sharpness Normal
Color saturation Normal
Color tone Normal
Color Space
sRGB
File Size
1756KB
in a response to bosie (if anyone ever looks again). i was panning at an extremely slow shutter speed in part because i wanted to get a panning image so the background was blured. on a bright afternoon i wouldn't have shot so slow, however, it was at dusk and there wasn't enough light to shoot at a faster shutter speed and still have a normaly exposed shot. i was reading in a national geographic photography help book made up of their photographers a couple of weeks after i shot this, and they said to start around 1/250th of a sec for racing. and the better you get the slower you can go. however, i had to make a huge compromise because of the lack of light. so i had to be all that much steadier. personaly i am pretty suprised about it now when i think about it. it should have been much harder than it seemed at the time.
I like the shot but the composition just doesn't seem quite right. The cars seem very small. Technically the sharpness is very good - your panning is great.
Excellent - one of only a handful of entries that really convey the illusion of speed. The colours are great as is the focus. Spot on !! You've got my vote for blue ribbon
This is a great capture and fits the "speed" theme perfectly. Both cars are frozen perfectly, while the blur of the background shows some high speed! Very well done.
Car racing is great for speed photos. These guys must have been going, what, 180mph? You did an excellent job to freeze them, and to have the stands & road completely blurred out. Good choice to use the green car in the photo, as the color really stands out. Good Luck!
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
