Motorsport Photography at Night

[Marc27]

I'm attending the Silverstone 24 hours race next month and I've never attempted to take any motorsport shots at night before. I was wondering if anyone had any tips or advice on shooting racing at night? I'm more interested in trying to capture the cars themselves racing than any "arty" stuff although I'll probably try some of that too. Any tips or info gratefully recieved, thanks.

[badgerbaiter]

the obvious thing to do is take the photos in the most well lit places, but otherwise my main tip is experiment!

remember that the headlights will confuse your camera into thinking its lighter than it is, so it wont expose the pic for long enough.

if you can get close enough then use the flash, but its best to only use it for side on shots. i prefer not to blind the drivers (although it doesnt bother some photographers)

use the highest ISO possible

sometimes panning with long exposure and a flash can produce some interesting shots! GHOST CARS !

i'll find a few shots from le mans to point out the different ways the photos were taken

[badgerbaiter]

you should be able to grab the EXIF data from these photos, but otherwise i've described the settings to the best of my memory

flash, with high ISO and relatively fast shutter speed.. notice all the sponsors have lit up, and that the car looks fairly frozen. you can tell its a high ISO too because the pic is very noisey





same car, same corner, but without the flash.. still noisey from high ISO, but the shutter speed is longer and the car looks like its going faster. the decals arent reflecting either.





taking the photo in a floodlit area with the flash on too makes life a lot easier!




and of course you have to do the obligitory long exposure photo! get the tripod out! use the lowest ISO you can, set the exposure to about 20 secs. be careful, though because the long exposure can overheat the sensor and cause noise





i hope this helps some.. i am by no means an expert and Le Mans was my one and only go at it.. i used the camera in fully manual mode for a lot of it and just kept expirementing and trying to understand what was going on. just avoid those headlights looking straight into the camera, they make life harder than it needs to be

[Marc27]

Thanks, thats a massive help! You might not be an expert but you certainly seem to know what your doing far more than me! I'll have to have a play around with the settings on my camera. I was thinking of taking some photos of cars in the street as practice before I go although it might get me some strange looks!

[badgerbaiter]

get down to your local sainsburies car park at 1am.. there will be plenty of vauxhall corsas flying around in the dark for you to practice on

[bauble]

I will be there too and also trying to get few good night snaps, like marc27 Iwill be groping in the dark (pun intended) as I took a few last year and was pleased but they were not up to the standards seen here.

My problem is that when I try different settings I never make notes so don't know what worked and what didn't. A true amateur. Or complete P****

[badgerbaiter]

your probably like me.. you think you will remember the settings next time, but you realise you've already forgotten them 10 mins later

[MikeHoyer]

Just check the EXIF data of the files