Every once in a while I start to feel stagnant in the work I’m doing. After dedicating the better part of the last year to focusing on light painting and night photography, I’m hitting that wall. Thankfully, with the spring arriving, the tracks are starting to open back up again. While I’ve never been real interested in motorsport photography, that’s mostly due to the fact that we’re pretty limited in what is available in my area. Aside from an old drag strip that seems to change hands every few years, we’ve got a local SCCA chapter that does a few autocross and rallycross events across the state, and a pretty nice dirt track.
This past Saturday I received an invitation from a friend to join him at the dirt track as it was holding an open practice event. I figured this would be a great opportunity to brush up on my tracking shots and.. well.. that’s really all I did. By the end of my visit, I realized I’d focused entirely on capturing motion shots of cars passing by my lens, as well as a small handful of frozen shots where the cars just looked parked on the track. As I sat down to go through my shots and begin editing, I realized that this was, despite a nice collection of race cars racing, a very bland set of images. So.. what’s missing? Shots of the drivers? Shots of the crowds (well - that’s not possible, as spectators were sparse due to it being a practice night and the cold front that moved in just before the event started)?
Looking for more photos from this night? Here’s the full gallery from this event.
I’m a photo set kind of guy. After my first couple of months into automotive photography, I turned my gaze on publications and features. This taught me that I needed to create sets of images, not just a couple shots of a subject and calling it done. And, to be honest, I’ve never really thought about what a collection of images from a race event is supposed to look like because.. I don’t shoot that kind of thing. Perhaps it’s time to track down someone who excels at this type of photography to see if they can offer a bit of guidance?
*Fun fact - This is my second trip to the dirt track as an adult with a camera. My first trip was to shadow a local driver to put together a short video on how he got into the sport and what drives him. If you enjoyed these photos, you may also enjoy the images and video we put together on him back in 2017: Dueces Wild.
*Fun fact #2 - Did you know I (briefly) hosted an automotive photography interview channel on YouTube? I’m so used to diving in when I’m interested in something, I figured that format could help teach me (and others like me) tips, tricks and techniques for improving in certain areas of the automotive media genre. It’d be fun to get back into that if I could actually track down some big talent again!
Gear: Sony A7RIII, Sony a6600, Sigma 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM, Sony 24-105 f4 G OSS, Sony FE 50mm f1.8
Post Processing: Adobe Photoshop