The day of the race dawned and we headed to the track with our expectations high. For me this was a first and I hadn't really thought my camera strategy through. This was evident when I arrived back home to find a good number of pictures were not up to scratch.

So what was my aim? Well I understood that it wasn't just a case of snapping away with a very high shutter speed to freeze the action. This would have resulted in a wide open aperture and a resulting compression of the depth of field. This would have made it more difficult to get my shots in focus. The ideal seems to be to use a high enough shutter speed to get the car pin sharp, with a panning action to blur the background but not high enough to freeze the wheels. If the wheels are blurred as they spin too fast for the shutter to freeze them, then this creates the overall effect of a very fast moving car. So I was aiming for a mid value shutter speed, panning the lens to follow the car, and hoping the focus would be spot on.

So the images that follow represent my efforts toward this ideal. I would have probably had a much higher success rate if I had thought about using the follow-focus and spot focus settings on my camera. Oh well, a good reason to go again!