With the prices dropping on Digital SLR camera's it seems that nearly everyone can afford one. This is great because it's bringing so many more people into learning the art of photography. I've been shooting for a few years now and I still consider myself far from a good photographer. I'm learning something new everyday though, and I wanted to teach you out there how to capture motion of a car.

The beginner will put his camera in sport mode and just snap away. You'll get some great shots but the subject will look like it's frozen in time. Here is an example picture of what I'm talking about.


(Pictured Here is John Thawley who is a great motorsports photographer and Honda Challenge Participant)

So as you can see in this picture the subject looks like he might be parked there, or he may be moving. You don't know. Why do pictures look like this? You get this look mainly because of the shutter speed. The shutter opens and the camera records the digital image. The faster the shutter opens and closes the better the clarity of the image. This picture was shot with a 1/1600th of a shutter speed. This means that for 1 second time period that shutter was only open for 1600th of that second. At this speed it will make anything going fast or slow look like it's standing still. You should be able to see every detail in the image.


So how can you make that car look like it's moving? You can do this by slowing down the shutter speed. By doing so the image will not grab all the details in the shot and if anything is moving in the shot it will appear blurry. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light the camera lets in and the less detail your image will get. This sounds bad but if done right makes an awesome photo.

Now we don't want the subject to be blurry so what you do is you follow the subject from left to right or right to left depending on which they are approaching. Just use a nice fluid motion and once you feel the subject is where you want it snap that picture. This is know as panning. Panning is following the subject in motion and then taking the picture.

If your camera has a time value mode such as on the Canon's TV mode this is a good place to start. You can set the shutter speed and the camera will set the other functions such as Aperture and probably the ISO.

An ideal setting to start with on a bright day might be a shutter speed of 250. As you get better with practice some people even go as low as 80. So with TV mode you set the shutter speed and it does the rest.

This picture here was shot at 1/100 sec. (1/100sec, F14 ISO-100)



There are few things to keep in mind when panning. The lower the shutter speed the more throw aways you'll have. Throw aways are blurry pictures that suck. As you get better though you'll have less of them. Anytime I shoot, I shoot some low shutter speed shots and then to be on the safe side i'll bump it up to 500 and shoot them too just in case. So have fun out there and gets lots of practice. You can even practice on cars just driving by down your street.