Panning is HARD!

On March 19, 2017, in Florida, by admin

Corvette Racing Car #4 at Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway (click to enlarge)

I had the opportunity to attend the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway with a member of the Corvette Racing management team.  We had pit passes which allowed us to get right next to the track.

The race was my first foray into “action photography”.  As you can tell from all the other images on this website, I usually have my camera mounted on a tripod, use long shutter speeds, high f/stops and a cable release.  None of those this weekend!

Of course, the first thing you need to do at a race is a panning shot.  Above is the best of several dozen attempts.  I would shot in continuous mode and track the car as it went by.  I used the continuous-servo auto-focus mode on my Nikon and the Auto-Focus-On button on the back to keep focus as the cars passed.  The Auto-Focus On button allows the camera to continuously focus while the shutter release button is fully depressed.  After doing this the first day I really came to love the Auto-Focus On button instead of relying on depressing the shutter release button halfway to focus.

Because the intent of a panning shot is to keep the subject in focus and blur the background, I used f/4.0 on my 70-200mm zoom lens to limit my depth of field.  I then used various shutter speeds to see how they affected the image.  What I determined is that the longer the shutter speed, the longer you had to track the car.  The longer you had to track the car, the more time there is to blur the subject because of failing to track the car at the right speed.

I ended up using 1/100 seconds for the above image.  I have other images where I froze the cars motion and those required a shutter speed of 1/2500.  Compared to 1/2500, 1/100 is a lifetime!

The red, white, and blue seats in the background make for good blur and an interesting background.

Daytona International Speedway: N29 11 05.07 W81 04 25.32

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