I practiced this move over the weekend and it was a little harder than I had hoped with cars that were only going 50mph. I'm glad no one came up and around to ask me what I was doing. I felt a little like a spy or identity thief. Oddly, a police car was one of my few "keeper" shots, lol.


1. Turns out, my tripod does pan left to right fairly well. I set it up to swipe a particular region. At first I tried to pick a mark and swipe and fire at the mark. Not so great because you really do have to track the car. Then I tried to follow the car. Through the viewfinder was sketch. I have to wear stupid reading glasses now, and as a result, I really don't enjoy using the viewfinder anymore. So, I used Live View and that was more or less ok.


Do I really want to use my mono pod here? I'll try again, using my mono pod this time, but it seems like if I can get a decently smooth pan with my tripod that that is the way to go. Then again, the mono pod seems like a modified version of hand held, so, maybe that will be faster to track with.


2. Shutter speed was tricky. I found myself happiest around 1/60, or maybe even slower than that. The trick is to make it slow enough so that the background can blur. I imagine with race cars at full tilt, I will want to use a slightly faster shutter. I think the faster shutter will help me freeze the car a little bit, but at what cost to blurring my bg?


3. Keeper rate from this experiment was really low, like 3 out of 40. Tracking was hard enough on its own, then getting the car more or less well inside the frame, and then getting the pan right so that the car was actually sharp and in focus.


Thank goodness it's a 10 hour race.


Thanks for the help everyone. I have no pics to post, they were all pretty scrubby in the end.