I've had a lot of people ask me how I got the shot below. (I get asked about this one quite a lot).
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Many have asked me if I photoshopped the shot at all. The answer is no. What you see is what came off the camera. Some of the comments I have had back have been along the lines of;
"I'd love to be able to get a shot like that. I see them all time time in racing magazines and I have always wondered how to do it"
Well, it's dead easy. In fact the Laws of Physics do most of the work for you with a shot like this.
Given that I have been asked so often, I thought I'd go through the actual set up of this shot, and also why it works the way it does.
The shot is in fact a standard panning shot, taken at close range to maximise a phenomenon known as "Parallax Effect". "Para-what?" I hear you say......
In layman's terms, essentially the shot looks the way it does because some parts of the car are travelling faster (in relation to my camera lense) than others are. Rather than trying to explain it in words, I've drawn a diagram below to explain how it works. For the purposes of this explanation, I want you to imagine the camera is not panning, but fixed on a tripod. This will help you understand how the parallax effect works, without throwing in the complication of considering the panning action too (trust me, it will make sense!).
OK, here's the situation with the car in its start position.
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OK, we open the shutter with the car in the above position. Note the three coloured lines (Ra, Ma, Fa). Each of those lines represents the distance each part of the car is from our lense.
Now, after the car moves 1 metre, we close the shutter - as shown below.
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We have three new lines illustrating where the parts of the car are in relation to our lense.
OK, now if we look at a comparision of the "shutter open" lines, and "shutter close" lines, we can see pretty clearly what's happening with the shot.
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To get the image at the top of this post, I also added a flash into the mix and set it to second curtain sync, it adds to the effect.
Also, you'll get better results with a shot like this if you can get close. I was less than one metre away from the car above when I took the shot.
I hope that you find this post useful. And if you already knew all this, feel free to ignore me.
Cliff
P.S. Shots like this work way better with a wide angle lense, the distortion in a wide lense adds to the effect.
