Motorsport Panning: Beginners Guide

If you want to introduce a sense of movement into your photography, panning is a great tool to have on your belt. It may seem daunting at first, but with your camera set up correctly you can probably nail the basics during a morning at a motorsport event. It’s great fun, extremely rewarding and doesn’t require thousands of pounds of gear to do it.

All images in this guide were taken from public positions at public UK motorsport events, I am an amateur photographer so there is no special access, trickery or photoshop involved. Apart from some basic Lightroom adjustments (cropping, exposure and colour correction) they are pretty much as they looked straight out of the camera.

Nikon Z5, Nikkor 24-200mm, 150mm, 1/40, f25, ISO 100 (Goodwood Festival of Speed)

Gear

One of the major misconceptions with panning is that you need good gear to do it. That’s not really the case, pretty much any interchangeable lens camera and lens will be good enough for the task (trust me on this one). Want a nice sharp, static shot of a car coming straight at you? Yeah that’s going to cost you. Panning? Not so much. The image below was taken with a Canon EOS 100D and a Tamron 70-300mm (the cheapest version). The entire kit, with spare batteries and memory cards, cost me less than £140.

Canon EOS 100D, Tamron SP 70-300mm, 300mm, 1/80, f14, ISO 100 (Thruxton Circuit, BTCC)

if you’re starting from scratch, a cheap DSLR or mirrorless camera and lens will serve you better than a bridge camera and allow you to upgrade in future. if you already have an interchangeable lens camera with kit lens, there is nothing to stop you using that but you may find you need a bit more reach. Just hunt down the cheapest telephoto lens you can find. In the UK sites like mpb.com are crammed full of affordable used gear (with warranty) and whilst they cost a little more than some bargains you may find on eBay, it’s a much safer way of doing business. Telephoto lenses with a range of 70-300mm are typically available at the cheapest end of the market, and as luck would have it that’s a perfect zoom range for motorsport.

NEW: I’ve summarised much of the stuff below into a handy PDF cheat sheet which you can download and have handy on your phone…

Cheat Sheet

Settings

Every system has different menu layouts and different naming conventions, but most of the settings mentioned here have reasonably standard names and are usually found in the main shooting menus (or via quick menus or additional physical buttons, if your camera has them). You may need to consult your camera manual for some of these.

Shutter Priority (typically ‘S’ or ‘Tv’)

This is the key setting that will allow you to adjust the shutter speed and is usually on the main mode dial. It is the crucial element in achieving blurry backgrounds and wheels. 1/200 will be my starting point for this guide and will be enough to generate some background blur for all but the very slowest of vehicles, so dial that in.

Continuous Autofocus (typically ‘AF-C’ or ‘AI-Servo’)

This setting tells the camera to continually re-focus on moving subjects. As vehicles will typically be moving at 50mph+ at motorsport events you’ll definitely want it to be doing this.

Drive/Release Mode (typically ‘Sequential’, ‘Continuous’ or ‘Burst’)

Most cameras default to ‘Single’ shooting mode, which is absolutely fine for day to day photography, however for motorsport you’re going to want to speed things up, so dial in the Continuous mode.

This is typically a fairly prominent setting, either as a physical dial on the camera (i.e. S, CL, CH) or as an easily accessible quick menu option. If you have a choice between Low and High speed, Low is absolutely fine when starting out. Firstly it means you won’t fill a memory card in 45 minutes, and secondly it’s going to help you learn better panning technique when starting out.

AF Priority Mode (typically ‘Release’ or ‘Release Priority’)

This is an advanced setting but I’m mentioning it here as it may trip you up unknowingly. It’s a clever setting found on many cameras that attempts to stop you making silly mistakes, it does this by refusing to allow you to take a photo if it thinks the subject isn’t in focus. The setting may be split by AF-C (Tv) and AF-S (Av), so make sure you’re changing the setting for AF-C/Tv. You’ll want to set this to Release / Release Priority (not Focus).

If your camera is letting you shoot away freely (some modern cameras are good enough to know when focus is locked even on very fast moving subjects) or if you don’t have these settings, don’t worry about them.

Image Stabilisation OFF (typically ‘IS’, ‘VR’, ‘OIS’)

Image stabilisation is great when you want to minimise the risk of getting blurry pictures of static objects, but it’s likely to be fighting against you when panning, so switch it off. This may be a switch on the lens itself or a menu in the camera (or both!) or you may not have it at all.

Some cameras/lenses do have specialist ‘sport’ (or even panning) modes, but in my experience they are not particularly reliable. Play it safe and switch them completely off.

Advanced Settings

You should be pretty safe to ignore everything else for now. The one thing you may want to tinker with when you’ve got the basics down is the AF area mode (again, if your camera has this), as this tells the camera where to look for the subject (vehicle). I use the basic ‘Single Point’ setting, but some cameras have exceptionally good tracking modes (in which case you’ll see the AF box in the viewfinder dancing around). If you’re struggling to keep the AF point over the subject, have a read up on the options available to you in your camera manual, it may have a setting that helps.

Many cameras have Custom or Recall modes on the main dial where you can dial in all the settings and save them, meaning you don’t have to set up your camera from scratch every time you rock up to an event. I have all the basic settings described in this guide saved to the ‘C2’ setting on my Panasonic S5, so when I arrive at an event I can start shooting straight away.

Basic Technique

With your settings dialled in, find a nice spot. To get started you ideally want somewhere where you have a clear, unobstructed view of the track with the cars/bikes/whatever running parallel to you (i.e. a straight bit of track). Straight sections of track are more likely to offer fence-less views (because they are safer than corners), if you can get down to as near as track level as possible that’s a nice bonus.
Stand straight on with the track directly ahead of you, feet apart and facing straight forward. Pull the camera firmly into your face, holding the camera with your right hand and the lens with your left hand (particularly if it’s a fairly big lens). For added stability you may also find it best to tuck your elbows firmly into your body.
Find a comfortable zoom level so the subject is going to fill between one third and half of the frame when it is directly in front of you, then find a car heading your way and start tracking it through the viewfinder.
Pan the camera as smoothly as possible with the shutter half pressed, trying to keep the car roughly in the centre of the frame. As it’s just about to pass directly in front of you, fire away. It’s crucial to maintain the panning motion whilst doing this and to keep going until the car has passed. Think of it as a golf swing (I’ve never played golf), it’s one smooth motion all the way through, including the ‘follow through’ after you’ve hit the ball/taken the photo. Your feet should not move at all (so forget the golf analogy now), the movement all comes from your hips and shoulders.
If you’re on a fairly low continuous shooting mode you may have 3 or 4 photos max, in my experience it’s usually the second or third that has the best hit rate but you’ll gradually get a sense of the movement speed required to track the car. Being in a high continuous mode and firing off 25 frames isn’t really going to help, as that’s just playing the averages rather than really getting a feel for what is working.

Nikon Z5, Sigma 100-400mm, 340mm, 1/40, f14, ISO 50 (Silverstone Classic)

Bringing Shutter Speeds Down

So you’re nailing 1/200 pans, it feels good, but you want more. Start knocking the shutter speeds down once you can consistently nail 1/200 pans. Your hit rate will deteriorate as you push it further, but keep at it and it’ll start to come together. There are no major shortcuts with panning, you just need to work at it.

If you hit a brick wall at a particular shutter speed (say, 1/80 for arguments sake) and just can’t get the hang of it, punish yourself further and go down to 1/50 for 10 minutes. That really focuses the mind on your technique, so once you’ve failed miserably at 1/50, jump back up to 1/80 and you may find it suddenly feels quite a bit easier.

1/250

At 1/250 you’ll get some wheel blurring and a sense of movement, but unless the subject is moving at about 200mph you won’t see much in the way of a sense of speed. The hay bales in the background are still clearly defined here.

1/160

From 1/160 and slower you’ll start to see a reasonable amount of blur as long as the subject is moving above 50mph. You can see how much the marshal (in orange in the background) has stretched across the frame.

1/100

Now we’re really starting to see a good amount of blur in the background, on the track and in the wheels.

1/30

Now we’re cooking! As luck would have it this has been caught at the exact same point as the 1/250 shot earlier. Compare the two and you’ll see that the background has really started to melt away now. You’ll also notice that whilst some of the car is pin sharp, other areas are a blurry mess. Once you hit really slow shutter speeds this is largely unavoidable unless the subject is travelling exactly parallel to you.

Panasonic S5, Sigma 100-400mm DN, 136mm, 1/30, f8, ISO 100 (Goodwood 78MM)

1/20

Say hello to masses of junk filling your memory card! You can see from the angle of the car that it’s moving ever so slightly closer to me, which is enough to annihilate a consistent plane of focus. The front end back to the front wheel are acceptably sharp, but the rest of the car, which is slightly further back, has completely blurred. At these types of shutter speeds you can say goodbye to the background.

Panasonic S5, Sigma 100-400mm DN, 136mm, 1/20, f10, ISO 100 (Goodwood 78MM)

Composition

I kinda went it alone when I started out and figured it out as I went along, but one thing I always remember is being told that the subject should always have space to travel into, rather than leaving more space behind it. I don’t believe in rules, but that one does actually work quite well in many circumstances. If I was to offer similar advice now, I’d actually rephrase it to ‘show where it’s going or where it has been’. The latter part of that phrase is particularly relevant when shooting anything with ‘stuff’ coming out of the back, whether that be a drift car with smoke pouring off the rear tyres or a rally car kicking up dust. The smoke/dust/spray is a key part of the story, so don’t crop it out.

Nikon Z5, Sigma 100-400mm, 400mm, 1/40, f9, ISO 100 (Castle Combe Circuit)

A common issue I see with people starting out is them losing loads of otherwise technically decent shots because they cropped a chunk of the subject off. Just because motorsport photography is typically a pursuit well served with a telephoto lens, it doesn’t mean you have to get in as tight as possible all the time. Give the subject room to breath, if nothing else it gives you far more scope to tidy up the composition by cropping it in the edit. My Sigma 100-400mm spends most of its life at 100mm!

Castle Combe has an infamous power line crossing the most popular corner of the circuit (stand under it on a damp day and you’ll know it!) but you never see it in photos. To me this image screams ‘Castle Combe’…

Nikon Z5, Nikkor 24-200mm, 24mm, 1/10, f4.5, ISO 1320 (Castle Combe)

One big thing that sets ‘professional’ motorsport images apart from the rest are low angles. Find them! They can be pretty limited for public spectator photographers but they are out there. The shot below was at 175mm (on a full frame camera) from a public position at Silverstone and not shot through a fence. The best thing about really low angles is that the public tend to avoid them (because you can’t see much)

Nikon Z5, Sigma 100-400mm, 175mm, 1/20, f20, ISO 50 (Silverstone Circuit)

Basically, consider composition as you would when shooting landscapes, portraits or indeed any other style of photography. Just because I’m mainly concentrating on the technical aspects of motorsport photography in this guide, it doesn’t mean that light and composition should take a back seat.

At 1/200 or thereabouts you’ll probably want to look for fairly clean backgrounds which give a nice uniform blur and really help the subject stand out. So…walk! I rarely stay in one position for more than 5 minutes (but will return to the same spots later on), explore the circuit/venue if you can.

Whilst clean backgrounds are nice, you can really blur out distracting elements once you get down to 1/50 and below and even intentionally add big streaks of colour by shooting with a marshal/tractor in the background, so make a mental note of locations as you wander round, they may give you completely different images depending on how far you can push the shutter speed down.

For this shot I moved back from the fence line where all the photographers were and shot from the crowd banking. By standing behind loads of people sat down I was able to introduce lots of interesting blur. Had this been shot at 1/250 it would have looked a mess, but by shooting at 1/15 and at a fairly wide angle (for motorsport!) it adds a bit of context to the frame and really makes the subject pop.

Panasonic S5, Sigma 100-400mm DN, 100mm, 1/15, f10, ISO 100 (Goodwood 78MM)

Got all that? Head over to the Advanced Guide when you’re ready for more :)