First go at motorsport photography - Pirelli Rally 2010 at Kielder

I went to my first rally event on Saturday, the 2010 Pirelli International Rally, and had my first go at motorsport photography (or photography of anything moving quickly for that matter).

These are all from Stage 6 - 'Roughside'. Unfortunately I didn't get to Stage 12 as I planned to due to a fairly large stone piercing the three week-old front left tyre of my dad's car - who quite sensibly didn't want to risk getting a second puncture with the spare already used up.

I was using a Canon EOS 450d and an EOS 33v (but I don't have those developed yet) with a Tamron 70-300mm f/4-5.6 which performed better than I expected it to thanks to the bright weather. I got a much better 'keep rate' than I was expecting too - around a third - though a smaller number of those would be suitable for A4 prints than were for a 1024 width image on the internet.
It ended up being a bit 'same shot different car' due to some annoying trees - which made it hard to get shots of the cars turning in - and not being sure whether we were actually allowed out of the spectator area or not.

Click the image for its corresponding Flickr page.

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They look pretty good to me,given the restrictions you had .
Bet they look even better at proper size.
Pons

Nice set Daz, you certainly captured the speed that the cars were going. I would definetly get out of the spectator pens. Get there a little earlier and have a walk into the stages and there are some great corners etc, to be found. As long as you stand in a sensible place the safety cars and marshals will leave you alone

Kev

Would love to see that last escort shot a lot bigger, looks spot on, would crop the tape out of the top of shot also.......
Kev has summed it up in these days of Health and Safety gone mad, youve already paid a tenner to park, in a National Park !( ie a park for the nation ), you should be allowed to wander where you like for that, hell, you should get a burger as well........
Tom

Congratulations on your first motorsport set Daz, not much wrong there for your first attempt, shutter speeds and exposure all good imho, nice compositions and colours also. The only things I would advise on attempting on your next outing would be trying a few different positions and getting shots with no tape or caution boards in the background, not always easy I appreciate but well worth the extra effort. Good work all round.

.........oh by the way, #126 Escort was driven on this years Boucles de Spa by Bjorn Waldegaard and Stephane Prevot, they finished 3rd..... looks great with Yellow minilites !! , dont know who owns it but is Belgian registered........

Tom
canonish

I'd be pretty damn happy if they were mine.
More than pretty good for a first attempt - I'd say "Nailed!"
Panning can take a while and lots of practice to get close to getting anywhere near good - these are near perfect.
I've seen stuff from photog's with a lot more experience that don't put out anywhere near that quality - on a bad day, myself included.

Thanks for all the input.
I'll certainly try to find a better spot and move around a bit more whenever I next go to an event.

Most of the cropping is a little bit looser than I would like as I was trying to maintain a decent level of resizing (going down to 1024px wide) as the lens is a tad soft.

I've done a tighter crop on the #115 Escort:

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