2002 maxima tracking

[Gregory Pappas]

Hello everyone- I just joined up here. Nice site. I bought a Nikon D70s a few months ago and just recently I´ve shooting a lot for practice. I have a few sets of panning shots but I thought I´d kick it off with my tracking shots. These were shot at a local high school. I was laying down in a minivan, shooting from the open hatch at around 35mph. We couldnt go any faster and I didn´t reall get the effect that I wanted, All were shot with shutter priority, ISO200. Usually the shutter was set at 1/40th. 1 & 2 were resizes and 3 is a 100% crop. C&C always welcome.

1.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v357/TomBoJangles/375retouched.jpg

2.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v357/TomBoJangles/300retouched.jpg

3.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v357/TomBoJangles/289Retouched.jpg

[Daniel Buck]

I haven't done alot of pan/tracking shots, but I think that I might have tried some longer shutter speeds. Looks like you were able to get a nice crisp car at 1/40 with no problems?, maybe try 1/30 next time? Heck maybe even a bit slower? :D What focal length were you shooting at? That will make a difference as well. A wider angle you'll see more of the background so you'll need to hold open the shutter longer to get more of the background blurred.

The farther away directly behind the car your background is (from the cameras point of view) the less motion blur they will have. This means, shooting in an open field witha tree line in the far background, the treeline won't be blurred very much at all, If you were to shoot on a highway with a treeline just a few meters from the road side, you would very easily blur the treeline with the same shutterspeed as before due to distance and perspective. Also, the closer things get to the vanishing point of the cars direction of motion, the less blur things will have. This is something to take into consideration, if you want to see a crisp spot where the car was coming from (or going to), or if you don't want to see that crisp spot you can move the camera more towards the side/profile of the car and you won't see as much of the vanishing point. You'll see the vanishing point alot more clear when using a very wide lens.

Anyway, thats my take on shooting from a moving car, I guess it's more theory than anything, but maybe it's helpful in someway :)

Oh, and welcome to the site :)

[Paul Hansen]

Hmm...

1/40th of a sec is plenty slow enough when in search of good subject/background isolation, but DOF plays an important part here as well. At ISO200 on a well lit day, with no filters, fstops will be relatively high. I usually will shoot in the ISO50-100 range with an two-stop ND filter or polarizer to open up the aperture as much as possible and keeping the DOF short. This adds a lot to the background blur, as you will be combining DOF scaling blur with motion blur, adding some intensity to it all.

Cheers

[Jacob Leveton]

another suggestion - have the driver keep his arm inside the car. You want the car to appear to be driving as fast as possible, emulating freeway speeds whenever possible. Most people I know don't hang their arm out the freeway quite like that...

Keep the crops tight, and I prefer to see space in front of the car as opposed to behind the car whenever possible (your 1st and 3rd shot).

[John Thawley]

Actually, DOF should not come into play here. In fact, I think stopped down, you get more streaking... as opposed to just blurring..

This was shot at about 50mph... 1/60th sec. ISO 100 f/16

http://gallery.johnthawley.com/albums/albun16/abs.sized.jpg

And 1/100th sec. at f/10

http://gallery.johnthawley.com/albums/albun16/abw.sized.jpg

The other thing to keep in mind with the background of a car-to-car shot is the further away the subject is from the background, the less motion blur you are going to get.

JT

[Paul Hansen]

http://www.sevenphotos.com/dev/the_nur/nur_003.jpg

ISO50, F11, 1/30th with a polarizer.

It all depends on your own personal vision for the scene, of course, but I like to have the aperture as open as possible. I did forget to mention that shooting the tracking shot while going through a curve will produce more background motion blur than in a straight line.

Cheers

[Gregory Pappas]

Hmm...

1/40th of a sec is plenty slow enough when in search of good subject/background isolation, but DOF plays an important part here as well. At ISO200 on a well lit day, with no filters, fstops will be relatively high. I usually will shoot in the ISO50-100 range with an two-stop ND filter or polarizer to open up the aperture as much as possible and keeping the DOF short. This adds a lot to the background blur, as you will be combining DOF scaling blur with motion blur, adding some intensity to it all.

Cheers

my D70s´ ISO only goes as low as 200. I was shooting with a Tiffen Polarizing filter. This was my first time doing any tracking shot so I set the shutter and let the camera do the rest. There will be a lot more experimenting in the future. Im just practicing. thanks for the tips. ill set it fully manual and see what happens

another suggestion - have the driver keep his arm inside the car. You want the car to appear to be driving as fast as possible, emulating freeway speeds whenever possible. Most people I know don't hang their arm out the freeway quite like that...

When I want to take some serious shots I´ll have the car clean and the windows will be up. My dad was driving, it was a nice night, and this was just messing around.

Thanks for your views and replies. When I get back to the states I´ll put up some other work I´ve done. Cheers

[Mark Delbrueck]

Paul thats one of my favorite shots I've seen from you!

Btw- This is an 03 Maxima. The 02's didn't have the updated headlights, tailights, grille, and came with the 3.2L engine as opposed to the 03+'s making use of the VQ35 3.5L unit.

[Gregory Pappas]

Paul thats one of my favorite shots I've seen from you!

Btw- This is an 03 Maxima. The 02's didn't have the updated headlights, tailights, grille, and came with the 3.2L engine as opposed to the 03+'s making use of the VQ35 3.5L unit.

no its my 2002 maxima and it has the 3.5L engine.