Photography
Welcome to Photography101!
This new section at Chequered Flag is designed to teach the bare basics of entry-level motorsport photography. Photography is an exciting hobby to combine with a love of motorsport - and in the digital age, it doesn’t cost too much to get involved. This guide is designed for those who have never pointed a camera in the direction of a racing circuit - by no means is it a complete guide, but I hope it will give you the motivation to enjoy motorsport photography.
Equipment
Photography can be prohibitively expensive. Buying lenses, expensive camera bodies, tripods, filters, bags, memory cards and so on. But those wishing to get started off need not spend a fortune to get the ball rolling. The following photos were taken on equipment that cost less than A$400.00 (₤175.00):
Technique
The racing track presents a very challenging and unique photography environment. Your subjects will often be moving at 100s of kilometres an hour, quite some distance away, hidden behind 6 foot wire fences. Not to mention the complications of trees, crowds, varying weather conditions, and so on.
One handy technique is panning. What this will achieve (hopefully!) is a crisp subject, with a blurred background and foreground (useful if you are shooting behind a fence). Set your camera shutter speed fairly low (perhaps 1/125th of a second). Stand somewhere where the car will be passing you parallel to where you are facing (the slower the car is travelling, the easier). Focus on the car is it entering your field of vision. Right as it passes you, take a shot. Ideally, you will have a nice crisp car, with blurred wheels and a blurred background.
Of course, if you want a perfectly crisp, focused picture of the car & immediate surroundings, you’ll want a different approach. Set your shutter speed quite fast (perhaps 1/500), and stand somewhere where the car is moving the least, relative to your vantage point (ie. stand with the car coming towards you, for example - if you are standing perpendicular to the car, it’s going to be difficult to get a nice crisp shot). Focus on the approaching vehicle, and shoot.
Don’t forget there is plenty of action off the track to photograph. Aerial displays, drivers walking around, promo girls, mechanics working, car parts, etc.
Post Processing
What a lot of people new to photography do not maximise, is the ability to improve their photo after it has been taken. That photo that is slightly lop-sided and too dark could be a winner with only a few small changes.
Things you may like to change in your photo:
Rotation: If the horizon is featured in your photos, make sure it is level. Even a tilt of a few degrees will take away from the professionalism of your shot. Additionally, that fairly dull shot may come to life by tilting it on a major angle and cropping it down.
Cropping: With such high megapixel cameras available these days, you have a lot of space to play around with and crop away elements of your photo.
Sharpen: You can’t save an out of focus photo, but sharpening may make it just that little bit more presentable.
Saturation: You can work on this to bring out colours in your photos. Sometimes a slight saturation boost will bring out a new richness in your photos. Don’t go too far, though.
Brightness and Contrast: Maybe you chose the wrong ISO. Maybe the flash has over-saturated your picture. Maybe the weather was too bleak. Either way, you may still be able to salvage that picture.
Other: If you have DSLR camera, you can shoot in a format that is known as “RAW”. Wikipedia describes RAW:
“A raw image file (sometimes written RAW image file) contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of a digital camera or image scanner.”
Why shoot in RAW? Basically, the RAW format saves a lot more information for post-processing. Settings such as White Balance, which are usually selected prior to exposure (either manually or automatically), can now be edited in post-processing, as the camera has saved all the possible options.
This section to be continued
