Races are not always run on bright sunny days, sometimes they race at night. Events such as the 12 Hours of Sebring, the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona, some races in the American LeMans Series and even local drag and oval track races include occasional night races.

Caption: This image of a racecar made during a night race at Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca has an exposure of 1/80 sec at f/5.6 at ISO 800 and an on camera flash was used. In this case, I “dialed down” the Canon 550EX flash by minus one and one-third stops, reducing the impact of the flash.

One of the problems of using flash at a motorsports event is that if you’re not careful you will produce a static-looking image that looks like the car is parked on the track, instead of going fast. That’s why in addition to using flash, you’ll also want to pan the camera using the kind of techniques covered in my post “At the Track.” Sure, using panning and slow shutter speeds can produce a slightly blurry photograph but the car will look as if it’s in motion, not stationary.

How much flash you should use under these conditions is not just a matter of applying a formula and depends on many factors including ambient light, camera’s ISO setting, lens used as well, as the speed and reflectivity of the car itself. As in much of sports photography, experience will be your guide. Start by using the flash at full power and then lower the output after reviewing the results on your SLR’s preview screen. If you can adjust the flash output, use the flash’s diffuser panel (if it has one) to spread the light.

Caption: Why you would even want to make flash photographs of night races? This photograph was made during the night portion of the six-hour American LeMans Series race at Weathertech Raceway Laguna Seca. The cars use reflective decals and the additional combination of headlights, dark backgrounds, and flash produce drama. Exposure with a Canon EOS 50D and EF 75-300mm lens was 1/250 sec at f/4 and ISO 800 with an EX 550 flash.

Safety Tip: Shooting at any racetrack especially at night can be dangerous. You should only make photographs in designated areas and if you use flash make sure that you only fire it at the side of the racecar. Using flash when a car is coming directly toward you is not only foolish but places you and the driver in serious jeopardy. He or she has enough to do without being blinded by your flash.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($3.50), click here.

Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography with new copies are available from Amazon for $21.450 and used copies starting around six bucks.

It’s #throwbackthursday and today I’m reminiscing about the only time, I was able to photograph in that most hallowed of racing venues: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway—aka the Brickyard. The Indy 500 is synonymous with motorsport and while I have yet to see the 500 race in person, I was able to photograph the penultimate US Grand Prix at Indianapolis as a guest of Ferrari.

This is how I made my favorite image from that race. The photograph (above) of Michael Schumacher was made during practice (or qualifying, I don’t remember which, sorry) for the 2003 US Grand Prix. The image was captured with an Olympus E-1 and 55-200mm zoom lens, which has a 2X factor so it produced the equivalent angle-of-view of a 110-400mm lens. The camera’s ISO setting was 200 with an exposure of 1/1000 sec at f/5.6 at 1/1000th in Shutter Priority mode. I was standing on the roof of the one of the garages at Indy, which requires a special pass, that I was lucky enough to get since, at the time, Olympus was a sponsor of the Ferrari F1 team.

When I returned home from the race that Schumacher had won in the rain I found that I never got as a good of image of him actually winning. So I decided to create an impression of that win—ala LeRoy Neiman—in the digital darkroom.

I first applied the Photoshop’s Watercolor (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor) and then the Poster Edges (Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges) filter was used to give the image an artistic look. Then I applied the Motion Blur command ((Filter > Blur > Motion Blur) but instead of using the kind of blur that follows the direction of the car, I made it more vertical with a forward slant to provide a more impressionistic touch.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.

Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $21.50 with used copies starting around eight bucks., as I write this. No Kindle version is available, sorry.

As the 2022 racing seasons begin to kick off down, here are some ideas to kick around, maybe, for this new season. After all the 2022 Rolex 24 at Daytona was on Saturday, January 29, 2022, so race days will be here before you know it.

Some of following suggestions about photographing motorsports may seem obvious to some of this blog’s readers but if you follow them I’ll guarantee that it will result in your capturing better images because there won’t be any non-photographic distractions:

Park your vehicle in a designated parking spot. The last thing you need to hear when you are getting ready to photograph a championship event is the race announcer calling “will the owner of the orange Gremlin, please move your car or be towed.”

Remain behind safety barriers at all times. But safety barriers are not set up everywhere around a track so use your judgment when choosing a place to photograph the race. If you’re not sure about the location that you’ve selected, chances are a safety worker will shortly arrive and ask you to move. Be nice to them; they have a tough enough job.

It may not be hot at the track but it surely will be loud. Be sure to bring a pair earplugs. If you don’t have a set, most track’s concession stands sell inexpensive earplugs but plan ahead and make sure to have several pair in your camera bag. They are easy to loose but are inexpensive to replace. Be ready to share your extras. As Emeril always says: “Make a friend.” Share with someone who forgot theirs.

Be alert while in the area behind the pits because there will be many scooters, 4-wheelers, motorcycles, or golf carts transporting people around. Be alert for cars getting ready to enter the staging area. Race cars don’t have horns like the family jalopy but you should hear them coming—even wearing earplugs.

As with most professional sport facilities, photographers are typically allowed to make video or still pictures of the vehicles for personal use but they may not be sold or marketed without having a prior arrangement from the speedway and/or the sanctioning body. Save yourself legal hassle but taking care of this when obtaining your track credentials. Even if the sanctioning body won’t permit photo sales, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell photographs to the teams and racers—especially during amateur events.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here.

TIP: Ask owners to remove any placards that are placed under their windshield (windscreen if British) wipers.

One of these days to be car show season again, although the monthly Vehicle Vault Cars & Coffee events continue through these Winter months. While Cliff and I have put our video series on hold, I am going to try to attend to shoot either one of my new film cameras or one of my new wide-angle lenses.

If you get to any show early and you should placards may not have already been placed under the windshield (windscreen if you’re British) wiper and the added benefit to being an early bird is that it’s also less crowded so people won’t walk into your shots. Most owners can talk for hours about their cars because there never was a restoration project that didn’t have some interesting twists and turns. While chatting ask them to also temporarily remove any show placards placed on the dash or under the windshield wiper. Don’t do it yourself!  Always ask the owner before touching any part of his or her car! It’s best to have them to remove any show placards, so ask politely

This Nissan-powered hot rod (above) was photographed at the SEMA auto show in Las Vegas—with the hood up! (Sometimes you can’t always get what you want.) Exposure with a Canon EOS 5D was 1/40 sec at f/4.0 and ISO 800.

You don’t have to be an expert on a particular marque or even cars in general, but you should be curious and polite when inspecting a car that might make an ideal photographic subject. If you see the owner, ask them a question. People who own interesting cars often have interesting stories to tell about their cars before it reaches the state where you would want to photograph it. If the owner is not around and the light is perfect, just shoot it as it is and try to select and angle that minimizes the placard or makes it easy to remove using Photoshop later in the digital darkroom.

This Allard above was captured using a Canon EOS D30 that had been converted to infrared-only capture by LifePixel. Exposure through an eBay purchased Russian-made 16mm f/2.8 lens was 1/160 AT F/16 and ISO 200 in Av mode.

I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they have done most of my Canon DSLRs and all of my Panasonic Lumix G-series mirrorless cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.

My book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography is  available from Amazon for $41.99 but used copies starting around nineteen bucks as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and is available from Amazon for $25.40 with used copies start around two bucks, less than your next cup of joe at Starbucks.

When photographing a car show or in a museum, I think it’s a good idea to make some close-up images of parts of cars. Don’t be frustrated by the lack of space and crowded working conditions that are often found at cars shows. Use that to your advantage by finding small details, such as the delicate nature of a classic’s grille or the sensuous lines of a street rod’s fender and capture them in sharp focus.

Wide-angle lenses or wide angle zooms let you fill up the frame with part or even the entire car while eliminating background distractions but make sure your zoom lens allows close focusing. Wide-angle zooms let you get close during crowded car shows but during some events you’ll need longer zoom lenses to bring the cars closer.

The large crowds at most car shows often make it impossible to use a tripod so I seldom use one but be sure to ask one of the show’s officials before schlepping any kind of support to a show. Image Stabilization or Vibration Reduction lenses or other kinds of in-body anti-shake technology are an alternative and let you hand hold slower-than-normal shutter speeds while maintaining small enough apertures.

Tip: Always get permission to use a tripod when shooting in a museum or a private collection.  Some museums don’t permit their use without some kind of permit but monopods can provide a steady platform for your camera in low light conditions, including museums or end-of-day outdoors shots and you may be able to get by using a tabletop tripod for on-the-ground low angle shots. Although I occasionally bring a tripod most of the time it stays in my (if I had one) car’s trunk. Right now my green Manfrotto tripod is in the back of Mary’s new Subaru Crosstrek.

How I Made These Shots: The above photographs were made at the J&R Vintage Auto Museum in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. During my visit to J&R, I brought along my Canon EOS 50D and my former do-everything lens, the Tamron’s 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC lens, that’s designed for cameras with APS-C sized sensors. The lens has VC (Vibration Compensation) that lets you use shutter speeds much slower than otherwise possible, under challenging lighting conditions like museums. This lens will also focus down to 19.3-inches throughout the zoom range.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: It is with great sorrow that we announce the road for J&R Vintage Auto Museum has come to an end. After more than 25 years of memories they closed their doors on March 30, 2019.

Barry Staver and Joe are co-authors of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s currently available for $21.44 with used copies starting around five bucks. The Kindle version, for some reason, is expensive—not Barry or I.

“The best way to learn how to photograph cars is “Practice, practice, practice.”—Joe Farace

Since there isn’t always a car show scheduled so why not shoot your own car?

On any given weekend pre-pandemic there was a car show or Concours d’Elegance happening somewhere. And that seems to be changing for the better, You can also find information about local shows in newspapers, enthusiast publications, and the Internet.

Lately, Mary has been finding local shoes on the Colorado Cars & Coffee group on Facebook. We found out about the group when we happened upon a small show at a local McDonald’s—nope, didn’t have a camera with me. But we met some nice people including the owner of a flawless 1957 white Susan Sommers Thunderbird and saw some great cars including a beautiful Bayside Blue Nissan Skyline and a charming 1930’s Ford pickup truck.

These kinds of impromptu shows are a growing phenomenon within America’s car culture and are not associated with a special event or organization but occur on a regular basis at a local donut shop or burger joint. These kinds of gatherings can be harder to find but make the effort because they are smaller in size and attract a different kind of enthusiast and cars. In addition to social media, visit shops that cater to cool cars, such as tire and wheel stores, upholstery, or paint shops, in short anyplace where you see interesting cars parked outside. Ask about upcoming shows, including those informal gatherings.

How I made these shots: The photograph of my now-departed Jaguar XJ-S at top was shot near Denver’s Mamie D. Eisenhower Park. It was made with a Pentax K-100 and smc Pentax-DA 50-200mm f/4-5.6 ED lens at 200m with an exposure of 1/350 sec at f/8 and ISO 200. One of the oldest tricks in the car photography book is to wet down the street to create reflections. I didn’t have permission or a hose to do that here so the water you see was added in post production using the wonderful plug-in called Flood from Flaming Pear Software. Download the trial version and give it a try,

The photo of my wife’s (former) low mileage 2006 Mercedes 350 SLK was made at a nearby lake using an Olympus E-M5 Mark I with Olympus 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R lens at 29mm. Exposure was 1/125 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 400.

You can see more of our old cars by using the blog’s Search feature and searching for “our cars.” 

Most digital point and shoot cameras have optical zoom lenses that allow you to vary their focal length and change the size of an image being captured on the imaging chip.

In most camera advertising, zoom lenses are often described by the ratio of their longest to shortest focal lengths. A zoom lens with focal lengths ranging from 100-400 mm is often described as a 4:1 or alternatively 4X zoom, a specification I dislike because it ignores the starting and ending focal lengths that I think are much more important that just the ratio.

For an example of an extreme optical zoom camera, you can read my review of the Nikon Coolpix P1000 that has a 125x zoom ratio here.

Many cameras these day, even sophisticated mirrorless cameras, also offer a digital zoom feature that is produced by cropping the captured image in-camera and then interpolating (making it larger) to emulate the camera’s maximum resolution. This process always produces a lower quality photograph than that what would normally be captured with an optical zoom lens because you are tossing away parts of the original’s image resolution.

Question: Was this classic car at top cropped or was it photographed using a digital zoom and does it even matter?

Answer: It was cropped from the original photograph—after the fact.

You can achieve the same effect as a digital zoom by cropping the original file with even the least expensive image-editing program.

So what’s the big deal about digital zoom? It’s all about marketing not photography, so don’t be fooled when the manufacturer erroneously combines the ratios of both optical and digital zooms giving you double the amount of worthless information.

For more about cropping please read my post “How I Crop My Drag Racing Photographs.”

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here

Dick Stolley who many consider Time-Life’s best Managing Editor once said that a successful photograph elicited a “Gasp Factor” from the viewer. Stolley went on to say that if an image stopped the reader, forced them to take a second look at it, read the story’s headline, and then perhaps the rest of the story, the photograph passed his test.

Often the best photographs are made under less than ideal lighting conditions. These images are often made on dark cloudy stormy days, at the crack of dawn, at sunset, or in the dark of the night.

There are few secrets about capturing images when light is low. The ingredients are a simple and include fast lenses, high ISO settings, and a maybe camera support. What sets a successful image apart from a less successful one is how these ingredients are combined, so it’s important to have most of your work done in advance. Before snapping the shutter, you should already know which ISO setting and lenses you’ll use. That’s why it’s a good idea to scout the location and determine the best spot to place your camera so you are free to concentrate on properly framing the image.

How I Made this Shot:At Cruise night in pre-pandemic Encinitas, California… Camera used was a Canon EOS 30D with EF28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM lens (at 53mm.) A slow shutter speed was used to add a sense of motion and produce light streaks, naturally in-camera—no Photoshop used. Sv exposure was 0.3 seconds at f/9 and ISO 800.

It’s much easier to take photographs in low light with an f/1.4 or f/2.0 lens than with an f/4.5 or f/5.6 lens because it produces a bright viewfinder on a DSLR but this is not necessarily true for the current generation of mirrorless cameras with high-res EVF’s. Camera companies usually sell two or three similar lenses in the same focal length range and many designed to work under normal lighting conditions, although this trends is fats changing. In photographic terms, “normal” means outdoors on sunny day. In the real world, “normal” lighting may be overcast weather, under the shade of trees or buildings, in brightly lit rooms or at night in city streets.

Not surprisingly, zoom lenses come in fast or slow varieties. Basic kit zoom lenses have maximum apertures ranging from f/3.8 to f/4, f/4.5, and even f/5.6 with many slow zoom lenses have a floating maximum f/stop. That means the maximum opening changes within the lens’ zoom range. For a 24-105mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom, for example at 24mm the maximum aperture is  f/3.5. But as the lens is zoomed toward the telephoto end, that maximum aperture gradually shifts to f/5.6. The downside is that fast lenses cost more and with DSLR and mirrorless camera’s performance getting better and better at high ISO’s, is the fast lens going to go the way of the passenger pigeon? I don’t think so because; right now anyway, nothing can replace that big, bright image in the viewfinder.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here.

Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photograph that’s still available from Amazon for $21.81 with used copies selling for around five bucks. For some reason, the Kindle price is really high.

If you ever find yourself in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I suggest you make the short trip to Los Ranchos and visit the Unser Racing Museum.

Unlike a lot of car collections, the Unser Museum is actually a museum and uses modern technologies to educate and immerse visitors in the world of motorsports. While there you can take a guided tour and learn about the Unser family history from the early days of racing from Pikes Peak and Indianapolis, including a racing simulator and interactive kiosks with details on many of the cars on display.

The museum staff is friendly and knowledgeable and I had a great time talking with them about the histories of the different cars. And on display they are featuring state-of-the-art lighting creating a dramatic environment but photographers may find they need to shoot at higher than normal ISO settings.

How I made the above shot: After some experimentation I ending up using ISO 6400 on the Canon EOS Rebel T3 I had with me to make the above photograph. Lens was EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS set at 18mm with an exposure of 1/80 sec at f/7.1 and ISO 6400.

One of the treats of my visit was to actually get a chance to meet and talk with Al Unser Sr. (below) who was working in the museum that day. The car that he won his last Indy 500 race is just behind us.

The museum was expanded to include an annex that contains more racing history, cars, and memorabilia. The annex contains fully restored vehicles including Indy 500 pace cars along with some rare race cars. There’s also a trophy room filled with thousands of unique items, a library spanning the history of racing, original artwork, and lots more!

PS. And if you’re visiting Albuquerque, please drop by The Frontier for delicious and affordable Mexican food. Not a sponsored comment, just my experience.

• The Unser Racing Museum is located at 1776 Montaño Road NW Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, NM 87107. 505-341-1776
• Admission: Adults $10, Seniors & Military $6, Kids under 16 are free
• The Unser Racing Museum is a Blue Star Museum. They offer free admission to active-duty military personnel and their families, including National Guard and Reserve, from Armed Forces Day, Saturday, May 18, 2019 through Labor Day, Monday, September 2, 2019.

Depth of Speed: High Mileage from Josh Clason on Vimeo.

To see what John Jackson is up to these days, including his new set of wheels, please visit his website Not Stock Photography.