One thing about living in southern Pennsylvania is that you’re spoiled for choice if you like dirt track racing. I generally become more interested in something if it presents me a photographic opportunity, and that was definitely true of sprint car racing. Between 2008 and 2012, I attended more than 50 races at Lincoln and Williams Grove speedways, partly because I knew a guy who ran a racing team, but mostly to practice a completely new photographic technique - panning.

In normal photography, you want to keep the camera as still as possible while it captures the scene. In panning photography, you need to move the camera (in a very particular and precise way) while it captures the scene. The way to capture images like the one to the right, for example, is to use a shutter speed too slow to “freeze” the motion of the car and, while the shutter is open, synchronize (as best you can) the movement of the camera with the movement of the car.

This, as I soon discovered, is difficult to do well. Much of how I’ve learned all of my photography has been through trial-and-error, and this was no different. I’d shoot hundreds of images of the cars flying by, then go home and do some reading on the internet and chatting on message boards about why my images didn’t look how I expected them to. If you’re looking for some quick tips: your main enemy is unwanted blur, which either comes from the shutter speed being to low for your panning skills or from parallax caused by the inconsistent relative movement between the subject (the car in this case) and the camera lens. To solve the

first problem, you just need to get better at panning, while understanding that there’s always going to be a practical limit to how slow you can go. This image of Cory Haas’s 11c barreling out of turn two, for example, was shot at 1/60 of a second at f/8, at a focal length of 100mm. I found that 1/60 was the practical limit for me given the speed of the cars and the distance from where I stood. Most of the time I’d shoot at 1/80 or even 1/100. Still, keepers were the exception: I’d generally delete eight to ten photos for every one I kept. To solve the second problem (the parallax one), get further away from the action and use a longer lens. The greater the distance between the camera and the subject, the slower you can go without seeing parallax blur.

One of the more interesting things that came of this was the interaction I had with other established photographers, guys who had been shooting these races for a very long time. The tracks have official photographers, and there are other professionals who get permission to shoot these events and sell their photos for profit. There are also lots of amateurs like me who are just doing it for the fun of it. When I started posting some of my images on message boards, though, I noticed that the professionals (and most of the amateurs who were emulating them as the gold-standard) weren’t shooting the cars this way. Instead, they were using external flash units on big metal brackets and shooting at much faster shutter speeds, more like 1/250 of a second. The results are quite different from the image you see here, and not (I’d argue, anyway) in a good way. The faster shutter speeds stop the action of the cars too much, making them look like they’re practically just sitting still on the track. The flash also produces some unpleasant reflections on the cars at night. These guys were shooting with top-of-the-line Canon SLRs (1D, etc…) and posting scores of mediocre-to-bad photos of these cars on track every week. I have to assume (being charitable here) that the photographers need to do this in order to make sure that they’ve got a few sellable images of every car that raced in the event, since they’re trying to make money. I won’t lose any sleep if I come home with just a handful of great shots, but the professionals can’t be so blithe about it, I’d think. The fact that they all shoot this way means that consumers don’t really have any choice, so there’s a cartel-like protectionism functioning there (although I don’t want to imply that they’re doing this maliciously, or even consciously). My forum posts did get a fair amount of attention, though, and many people much preferred my slow-shutter panning shots to the stuff that the pros were posting every week. I tried to stay out of it, but there were some invidious comparisons drawn between them and me. It was interesting to see, at least, and something I didn’t expect to encounter when I peeked into this world for a few years. If you find yourself in central PA any time between March and October, get yourself to Williams Grove on a Friday or Lincoln on a Saturday. Buy a pit lane pass and get into the infield to get these great panning shots.