Snow Drift Rally Night Shots

JSPhotography

C&C welcome

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kurtw

Anyone else notice that the driver in the "Boobies" car is running the biggest smile?

Rally shots are always fun.

JSPhotography

Same thing here. No comments means poor shots. What's wrong with these? Anybody else done this? Maybe it is just me but I thought this was a pretty tough venue and these came out quite well. It was dark, I mean DARK! You were lucky to see your hand in front of your face. Getting focus was a real challenge. I had a split second between head lights coming straight at me to the car being past me. What did a do wrong? What needs to be done different? I'm misssing something.

ian408

The aux driving lamps are pretty interesting. I like the driving in the snow part--but the driving in the snow at night? That looks sketch

Nicely done pictures!

kurtw

You captured the action.

Now, if you want one critical opinion, I'll say this: What is always striking about night racing is the fact that it's at night.

Next time, instead of trying to light the cars for a perfect daytime exposure, move the lights off camera into interesting locations that allow you to capture the darkness too. Shadows, blurs, etc, emphasizing shapes, lines and the illumination from the rally rights, etc. Move or modify your flashes so they don't produce an overexposed foreground at the bottom of every shot (E.g., move them, raise them, zoom them, flag/feather them, etc). Also, if you can, shoot when there's still some fading twilight.

Challenging. No question about it. I enjoyed the shots, thanks for posting them.

peoorvendal

I think Kurt had some good points.

I find that it looks when the race car wheels are frozen and not blurred. I realize that's a tad hard to do when shooting with a flash of course. :-)

But compare with the effect in this photo:



No doubt the wheels (and the car) are movin' there.

Sometimes you can use this for a nice effect when a wheel actually DOES lock up:



This is harder to do in a night shot, but Kurt's on the spot. Capture the motion you can. That's the essence of the sports. The snow caught in mid-air is the only give-away that these cars aren't just parked in the corner. I bet you can still follow the car's motion through the corner and freeze the headlights (and even the car with a flash) but motion blur the background for some really cool effects.

peoorvendal

I guess here's an even more extreme case of wheel lock-up by the way.

kurtw

I don't specifically mind stop motion wheels in dynamic shots that capture obvious action, which these do.

If I shoot a flat tracker laying it out and everything is frozen in a way that looks like it could have been a static pose, then I really want wheel blur. In other cases, it often looks really good but the slow shutter may or may not be worth missing a difficult, dynamic shot.

Looks great in that first autocross shot!

peoorvendal

I don't necessarily disagree, but to me it depends on much other context there is in the photo. You clearly don't get that helicopter view full context here, so the thing you *can* capture up close is motion. Or other weird or fun things, like the driver's expression in that Boobies car - priceless.

JSPhotography

Cool, thanks for the comments. I thought about getting the flash remote mounted but didn't have the time. Next year.