Night Racing Action

Hello,

I am VERY new at photography in general and the XTi in particular. While I can manage to take a decent picture during daylight hours, nighttime action shots are a real problem. My wife and I would very much like to take good action shots of our son's racing career and only have a week before a big national event. We intend to further our knowledge, but could someone give us a quick "down and dirty" set of settings (Creative Mode and/or manual) that would yield good photos of auto racing in a relatively dimly light environment?

Thanks in advance.

What kind of racing, how close can you get, what kind of lens assortment and flash's do you have? Night racign is very very hard. especially to get clean sharp images. I did soem night drag racing this past weekend and I was 5-10 feet from the motorcycles and it was tough even at iso 3200 and a flash at f2.8. I will post some examples when i get home tonight.

Stock car (Legends and Late Model Stock).
430 EX
Canon 75-300mm 1:4-5.6
Canon 18-55mm

Thanks

oops - can get within 50-100 ft, maybe closer

You may have a little better lighting than I generally do for night racing. It will be a trial and error thing depending on how far away you are. First try shooting in tv mode and get you shutter speed down to 1/125 of a second if you can pan with them smoothly and see how your pictures turn out. Start at iso400 although you will probably need iso 800 even maybe 1600 and clean them up with PS. 1600 on the xti is real grainy, but can be fixed somewhat. The higher the iso the faster the shutter speed you can use but much more noise.

If you can't get a good shot at 1/125th then throw the flash on and got o manual and set yout aperature to 4.5 or whatever the faster it will go and set your shutter to 1/100-1/200 and see if your flash gets out there enough to stop the action for you.

But pratice on several cars changing your shutter speed and iso till you hit the 'spot' then you are set for your son. Hopefully your flash will reach the car this will help a lot.

Think that is it really, try it out and post some images and see if people give advice on getting better results, But I do think you are going to be working on the very very top end of your equipments limit to even get reasonable results, unless the lighting is very very good on the track

Thanks much. We will absolutely practice before the feature race. These tips will give us somewhere to start. We will post afterward for further advice.

Have a great day!