Eric, great shots!

http://www.f1-photo.com/

Check out this website, Paul Henri Cahier, very old family friend, his father Bernard was a huge F1 photojournalist and has a bunch of cameo roles in Grand Prix. First time at a car race when I was 12 or 13 I went to the LBGP with my father and Paul and me lugging all their camera gear, this was also when I learned how to shoot cars and fell more in love with racing.

Just for info all of his photos are taken with a Canon EOS 1 and a huge variety of lenses and films. Velvia, Fujichrome, Kodachrome, Ilford, bla bla bla. Experiment and find a look you like and go with it. Tripods are expensive, heavy and a pain in the butt at the racetrack, I have never seen a photographer use one. Monopods are great, carry easily and work well for panning. Practice panning by following any moving object, keep your elbows tucked down against your sides to better stabilize the camera, you can get away with it when uses lenses under 200mm but when you get into telephoto lenses they get darn heavy, especially Canon since they still use real glass for all their optics.

Know all about your camera, what it can do, play around with shutter speed and your aperture. Paul and my father never used film faster than 400 as far as I can remember, they instead would "push" the film faster if they wanted to. I love pushing film, you can get some pretty neat effects.

Practice, practice practice, just like anything else, the more you use your camera and play around with it the better you will get, did I mention it can also get pretty darn expenzive?

Some neat tricks I picked up from them are pretty simple and get neat results. Instead of buying 10 different lenses get three or four versatile ones, 20-35mm fisheye, 50-85 or so and a 200 work great at races, telephotos can be rented for a very reasonable price. To double your fun with lenses try out a "coupler" or magnifier, it is a small lens like piece which fits behind the lens and against the camera body, it magnifies the lens you are using by whatever magnification you buy.
They are a cost effective way to double the use of your existing lenses.

Another simple trick is to zoom the camera lens out as the object (car) is coming towards you. This gives the illusion of much more movement than is actually going on and looks darn good. Look through his site, most of the Schumacher pics are done this way when you see one part on the car in focus and the rest looks blurred with speed. Most of the closeups are done with a fisheye lens and are taken from a few feet away which gives the effect that the picture has been wrapped around a large ball.

zooming out while car coming towards you with a telephoto lens

http://www.f1-photo.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?ImageName=Schumacher_1997_Estoril-Test_08_PHC.jpg&Input=michael%20schumacher&RowSize =5&Offset=1&TotalSize=25&Lang=en&NamePage=picture &

using a fisheye from a few feet away and zooming out

http://www.f1-photo.com/cgi-bin/display.cgi?ImageName=Schumacher_1995_Japan_01_PHC .jpg&Input=michael%20schumacher&RowSize=5&Offset=0 &TotalSize=25&Lang=en&NamePage=picture&


take a look at his site, some great stuff including old racing shots by his father Bernard. Most of the racing history I know is from them and my father along with all the funny behind the scene stories. Hope this helps you out a bit, just practice practice practice. I just got some photos back that I took at a PCA event at Fontana, I will try to scan them and post them up. Best of luck

std. for hand holding is shutter speed < 1/lens length

check out a book on action or sports photog. at tyour public library - put your tax $$ to work

this book looks pretty cool.
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/07...1.MZZZZZZZ.jpg

Chris- I have that book.
I found it quite helpful, and definitely worth the $20 purchase price.

even more worth it for $14 at amazon! :)

My birthday is this week - that book just made my "Wish list."

Thanks! :D

Good comments from all. The only thing I could add is to elaborate a little on PorscheKid962's method for tucking the elbows in against the body to stabilize the camera.

While at Willow Springs one day a much better photographer than me told me this trick. He said the trick is to keep your head, shoulders, and upper body completely still(like a rigid structure) and rotate your entire upper body using your torso to twist, keeping the subject in the same exact place in the viewfinder the entire time both before and after your shoot the picture. Follow through is very important. I later saw a picture he had made of a fast moving car that had the entire background blurred yet you could make out "Sabelt" on the driver's seatbelt. Cool.

Don't get frustrated. Action photography is difficult. Even professional photographers will shoot rolls and rolls of film looking for just ONE good shot.

I used to do some of this when I was younger and bought bulk rolls of cheap black and white film and loaded them myself. Then I would develop the negatives and make contact sheets. I would only have to pay to get enlarged prints of my good shots. It was cheap for me because I never had very many good shots........

Good luck and Enjoy.
Rob

I just ordered the book from Amazon. Thanks for the advice. This BBS rocks my sorry world. Our next scheduled AutoX is in September. I plan to take this advice from this thread and shoot as many rolls as I can with as many options as possible. I'll post any results to this thread and hopefully an improvement will be evident. :D

Last week, I replaced my Minolta X-700 SLR with a Nikon D70 Digital SLR. It is an amazing piece of equipment with images that are as good as film SLR cameras (no need to debate this here... check out www.dpreview.com for a good photography forum).

With digital, I can take hundreds of shots a day. They are viewable in real-time, processing - if needed - is simple (Photoshop), I can e-mail them instantly, and they are FREE!

Do yourself a favor and check out the high-end Digital SLR cameras from Nikon and Canon.

Since at a press of a button on the computer you can turn images into b&w, are there any benefits to shooting them in b&w initially? (Other than having a "peek" into what they will look like?)

i would always shoot in color. in-camera b&w is a one-way process (on any camera i've used) while it is reversible on the computer.

I agree. Shoot in color, then post process B&W or Sepia.

This is maxnine11's car:

(Image taken with a Nikon D70 in color. Post processed into Sepia. My brother took the shot.)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093625603.jpg

All very good advice so far. I would like to enphasize one point. Don't expect every shot to turn out. I feel pretty good, if I get about 8-10 good (Magazine quality) shots out of a 36 frame roll. As such, when I do shoot with film, I often get 3x5 prints and then pay for one I really like in larger sizes.

Digital cameras make this less expensive.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093627640.jpg http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093627662.jpg

ooohhh my collection is missing some nice large shots of 356s... thanks

Agreed, I'm drooling for a Canon EOS 30D, about $1000, but with a large bit of memory so much better than a film camera in most cases.

Dave,

I took them this July at the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. It is one of the only vintage street races in the US.

That's street as in "rally" right? I never knew that we had that in the US. I'll definitely attend next year! How competitive is it?

Did someone say 356? :D

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638282.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638293.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638305.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638325.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638347.jpg

It's been a long time since I thought about duotones. :)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1093638469.jpg