How to Shoot Race Car Pictures (with settings)
by Nicholas Johnson
In this article, I am going to write about taking pictures of race cars. Im going to cover specifically which settings I use, my camera body, which lenses I use and why; when to use motion blur to make cars look really fast and when to freeze the action to get nasty, gritty, irreplaceable photos of racing cars and teams who hire me to follow them at events.
Mainly, how to turn in pictures they simply cant get by handing off their iPhone to their buddy Jacob.
OK, it all starts with access.. The first and most important thing is getting permission.
You may find a team that wants to hire you to follow them through a race weekend, and sure they can get you a pit pass and everything. But, if you’re at one of the bigger tracks the first time you step over the wall to the hot side, a man in a yellow vest is almost certainly going to run over and make you stop what you’re doing before you can get a shot of anything at all.
Start by talking to the race series youll be shooting with. They have a relationship with the track and a lot of times they’ll get a press pass for you. If you can’t get a response from them, visit the press room or find some way to talk to contact the track directly about whatever permission you need. Because when you HAVE permission, youll actually have better access than the drivers! At Indianapolis Motor Speedway, for instance, once you’ve got the right orange vest on, you can basically go anywhere other than the track itself, INCLUDING the hot pit, which if you ask me is where the very best photo opportunities in racing really are!
LENSES
I bring 4 lenses with me to a race. Two of them I use far more than the others. 14–24mm, 24–70mm, 70–200mm and 150,600mm.
The 14–24mm typically stays in the trailer and only comes out for a couple creative shots. The 24–70mm is what I thought would be my main lens, particularly for running around the pits, but it turns out that the 70–200mm is the one I end up going for most often on race day. When people cant see you coming, or cant see you at all, they’re going to be themselves and you’re much more likely to capture whats really happening at the pits and in the paddock. When someone spots a camera, they almost always stiffen up, or they suddenly start to smile and for the most part smiles dont belong in these pictures, except the rare occasions when you can spot a team just having a really good laugh over who knows what they just did.
The 70–200mm is what Im holding most of the time; 70mm is still wide enough on a full frame camera to back up with your feet and get a whole scene, and 200mm is tight enough in that same scene to ram in and catch fine details on a situation that you would normally only see from afar. In the pits and paddock I do carry my 24–70mm with me in a padded bag on a strap in case I need to go wide.
Out on the track, I will typically have the 150–600mm equipped with the 70–200mm in a bag; we’ll talk in a minute about why you would use 200mm at f2.8 vs 200mm at f12, and you should be using both. I like to go out on my bike and visit a bunch of different photo holes and you cant always get right up on the track. If theres a really cool shot down a set of esses or a long straight but I still want to be full frame on a single car, Ill need that reach. Ive also found its a bit easier to match the speed of your pan to the speed of a car when youre doing it from far away and zoomed in rather than right up on the road side with a wider lens. On those shots, blur is coming from motion, rather than shallow depth of field, so a higher f-stop won’t work against you.
To sum up lenses — HAVE a wide angle in case you get a creative idea, but it won’t be useful very often. 24–70mm is a VERY versatile lens, just in general, and its going to be a personal preference between that and something longer like a 70–200 (possibly determined by your physical strength, a 70–200mm lens on a Nikon D850 is 6.5 pounds and these enduro races that go all day long.) The 150–600mm for the cases when you cant physically get to an advantageous spot but you can see it. In Dayonta, the back straight has a lake where you would otherwise like to be standing, but if you can shoot across the lake, you won’t miss something like when this guys front wheel came off at 130mph and he kept going anyway.
PRO TIP
If you can find or bring a safe home base, your body will thank you for only carrying the gear youre currently using, rather than everything you brought. I like to drive to these races, towing a big 24 foot enclosed trailer with a generator that doubles as another source of income, dragging strangers belongings across the country for money using the Uship app, and then doubling as my mobile office on-site where I have a computer set up with chargers and a safe place to put things down, not to mention cook some food and hang out now and then.
CAMERA BODY
For my main camera body Im using the Nikon D850. I upgraded from the D500 because I wanted to both go full frame, but also not lose reach. The 850 has a 47 megapixel sensor, so even though you’ve got a wider frame with the same lenses — you’ve also got an addition 23 million pixels per shot, so you can crop in really far without losing anything. And, fun fact, between these two cameras, the pixel DENSITY is about the same. The sensor is physically larger in the D850, which kind of means the 850 has a D500 built right into it!
That said, I have my D500 with me also just in case I do something stupid and destroy my camera. I can whip that thing out and not lose any time. They use the same batteries and cards and actually the button layouts are exactly the same, so its a very easy switch.
Im sure I’ll go mirrorless in the next couple generations once they’re REALLY all the way better in all ways. I fully recognize my Nikons suck at video, which is why I actually have a THIRD camera with me, the Sony Alpha a6600, mounted on a Ronin SC gimbal so I can always pick that thing up and have stabilized 4k video that locks on to faces in something of a magical way.
SETTINGS
I’ve watched a lot of ‘how to take race car picture’ videos on YouTube and it seems like people always tend to leave out the specific settings to use to get the specific looks theyre showing off.
And really, other than very unusual circumstances, like a 24 hour race when a lot of what youre doing is in near complete darkness, like this shot I took of a pit stop at Virginia International, There are 2 main shooting modes I switch between. Im either out on the course, trying to make cars look fast as they drive by, which means my aim is to keep the car in perfect focus while the back ground and the wheels are a blur. Or Im in the pit, trying to capture emotion of the team, either in a pit stop, or fixing something thats broken on the car. A lot of good shots come from them being in a daze, probably contemplating their next stint in the car (I shoot at very long distance endurance races where they switch drivers every 2 hours). Nevertheless, I want those pit pictures frozen in time with extremely precise and sharp detail.
So, the “go fast pictures”, I call them, the ones where the race car is on a road and is racing sideways or occasionally coming out of a turn. The METHOD for getting those pictures is simple — the act of actually making it happen takes practice.
Set your camera to Shutter-priority mode. That way you choose the length of time your shutter is open, and your camera will compensate aperture size for you based on available light (you CAN also have your camera decide on ISO, but in my opinion — you want to maintain control over that).
Get on shutter priority mode and set the shutter speed, initially, to 1/160, set your shooting mode to Ch (‘Continuous high for NIKON), and make sure your autofocus is set to af-c (continuous autofocus), thats a solid starting point. If you just cant nail it at that shutter speed, go up to 1/200, but you’re not going to want to go any higher than that unless the cars your shooting are going very very fast; these cars were probably going 100mph. Whats happening under these settings is… in the span of 1/160th of a second, a car going 100mph will travel about a foot. So a foot of dirt, grass and asphalt will pass by your open shutter while at the same time youre tracking the car through your lens so it will not travel anywhere in the frame during the same time. That means, IF you can successfully track the same speed as the car, you get a foot of motion blur in the background and perfect sharpness in the car itself, meanwhile the tires are spinning so they will blur out as well. When you look at these pictures, you can feel the speed of the car! Compared to a fast shutter where the car looks parked on the road.
Unfortunately, when you’re on a burst mode (continuous shooting) you’re going to have 10 or so pictures every time you attempt to capture a car going by, so you will have to go through a lot of pictures. But the further down you’re able to push that shutter speed, say in the 1/120th realm, the faster and better the car will look, but the harder it will be to keep the car sharp — so burst mode gives you 10 or so chances per try, to hit.
If youre shooting cars coming right at you and any time you CANT see the rims because of your angle of view, you’ll want to use a completely different setting.
For cars coming at you (or cars standing still) switch your camera to aperture priority mode (A on Nikon and Sony, Av on Canon). Now you are in charge of the aperture setting, change your aperture to the lowest f-stop your lens is capable of shooting and your camera will control shutter speed to compensate for available light. Again, I would maintain control over ISO — we’re aiming for the fastest shutter we can reasonably get at the lowest f-stop we have available, and auto ISO won’t be friendly to that desire. On a sunny day, with an f/2.8 lens, you’ll be shooting at 1/4000, possibly even 1/8000 and those photos will be super sharp. When in aperture priority mode, the depth of the photo will be controlled by your lens aperture, rather than motion — we’re attempting to freeze the motion and capture a single moment in time. So set your lens aperture all the way open (lowest f-stop), adjust your ISO until the camera puts the shutter speed at 1/800 or above and aim at the front grill of the car using af-c continuous back-button autofocus and shoot. The quality of photo you can get out of different ISO values varies a bit from camera to camera, but in the D850, you can shoot up in the 6400 ISO range early in the morning and still get usable photos.
We’re still on af-c autofocus mode, but I really want to push everyone towards back-button autofocus as a shooting style in general. When using this method, af-c is actually af-c and af-s in one. With your camera set up this way, when you hit the focus button (af-on on D850) and release it, even when you press the shutter to take a photo, it will not refocus. Alternatively, when you hit the back-button and continue to hold it down while pressing the shutter button, it will always be focusing forever (until you release the button).
SHOOTING IN THE PITS
Back in the pits and paddock I use this same set up as cars coming at me; aperture mode, wide open aperture (f/2.8 in my case) and fast shutter speed. Personally I’ve become accustom to mostly the 70–200mm f/2.8. But I will typically have my 24–70mm with me as I walk around, there are of course times when you’ll want to be close to whats happening.
Your press pass will be your most valuable tool in the pits. I am an amateur “gentleman driver” with the Gorilla Sticker BMW team in the Champcar Endurance Series, so I a have a complete understanding of what will happen and when, where to stand to not die, and exactly when that car or an adjacent one will start moving. By all means find a way to learn those things before you ever jump over the wall and share space with a race car. Do not put yourself in danger. Assume you are invisible and the driver will not dodge you, do not be in their path.
That said, the very best photos will be taken from the angles your audience simply cannot see with their own eyes. Squatting down and zooming in keeps you out of the way, and provides a seriously unique look into motorsport. Filling gas, changing tires, checking the engine — all provide for extraordinary opportunities! I was at Virginia International Raceway when one of the teams that had hired me needed to weld something back on under their front support post. Obviously when there are multiple guys and a mig welder involved you have to stay out of everyones way, but by staying back, finding a perfect window and a long lens I got one of my favorite shots of that weekend.
The pit stop is an extremely high stakes part of their race, so their emotions will be exposed and ready for you to steal and keep.
One other thing youre going to have to keep in your calculations when setting up open aperture photos is that your plane of focus is both narrow and also flat. Think of a pane of glass a few inches thick that exists exactly where you place your focus point but also remember that it is flat in respect to the front of your camera. The only parts of your photo that will be in focus start at your focus point and shoot straight outwards in 2D from that point. This is especially important to think about with team photos (in the case where youre going for a somewhat blurred background) but generally something to keep in mind when composing the action.
METERING
I start with center weighted metering and only change it if things aren’t coming out the way I want to see them. Overwhelmingly, whatever I am aiming at takes precedence over some bright light source in the background that could threaten
underexposing a moment I can’t redo.
WHITE BALANCE
White balance stays on auto, you can change it in post, and you’ll be under a number of different lighting conditions from sun light to overcast to headlights to artificial lights in the pits of all different color temps — just make your adjustments in the edit.
THATS IT
Practice these fundamentals without getting run over, and you will leave your event with some unbelievable race car pictures!