moving targets

moving targets, originally uploaded by edfooliu.

Sunday was the first in a glorious, three-weekend burst of autocrossing.
This one was a WDCR SCCA event, and these always host upwards of 250-300 drivers.
Consequently, there tends to be an awful lot of standing around waiting for
your run or work heat (wherein you do an awful lot of standing around
waiting to run with car or feet). Usually I simply fix my camera to my
in-car mount and just languish in the boredom (though honestly, I still very
much enjoy watching cars thrash around the course), but this time--and to my
later undoing--I took it with me for some practice with action
shots.

The first challenge is getting the bloody subjects in frame.
Cars flying by at 40mph give you a very small window of opportunity, and
this is compounded by the lack of a direct zoom control and a continuous
shooting speed measured not in FPS but in SPF. Needless to say, autofocus
is about as useful here as an overweight K9 unit. Endearing effort, yes,
but relevant to the goal, not even close. A quicker shutter speed was
necessary to get the fast-movers, but this demanded even more precision with
focus since my aperture had to open up accordingly. The only way I could
manage was to pre-focus on some area of the course and time the shot for
when a car would pass that point. This is followed, of course, by the
intended subject taking a different line through the corner about 15 feet
from the focused point.

One thing that did produce fairly
pleasing results was making do with a slower shutter and simply tracking the
cars better through the viewfinder. Naturally, 90% of these were
throwaways, with noses and tails clipped or entire shots blurred out of
intelligibility. When successful, however, there was a lot more sense of
action and speed to the shot, with the background and course motion blurred.
The mustang above isn't the best example of this--the car is slightly out of
focus (or just blurred a bit from my horrible tracking)--but I like it a
lot. The cones give a sense of speed, and having the frame trail the
braking car a bit adds something else.