Car Photography 101 – Moving Out Of Automatic

Ok, this post assumes you’re into cars and that you’ve either got a camera or are considering buying one and that you want to know more about the best way to shoot car photographs. If you’ve been taking photographs for a while, some of this may be familiar, but read on anyway, it might just jog your memory on a few things. I’m going to talk about exposure, shutter speed and aperture and how they affect car photography.

Exposure

You need to get a firm understanding of exposure. Not just the correct exposure using the camera’s built in meter, but the different effects that changing the shutter speed and aperture have on a photograph. The correct exposure is achieved using a combination of shutter speed and aperture. There’s often no single solution for this and the combination you choose will have a direct affect on the look of the final shot and this is the thing you really need to become instinctive about when shooting cars.

Do you want me to go into different shutter speeds and apertures or do you just want to keep leaving that control dial on ‘Program” Mode? You don’t? OK, great, here’s the run down on exposure designed to give you the courage to starting moving the dial out of auto mode and start exploring how to use those other settings.

Note – want to experiment without having to write down the camera setting to remember later? All modern digital cameras record the settings in a data file called EXIF, so you can use your favourite photo software to recall the settings you used later.

Shutter vs Aperture

The shutter speed is the duration of time that the sensor (or film as it used to be….) is exposed to light. The aperture is in the camera lens and is the size of the hole the light comes through. See, easy, isn’t it? Correct exposure is achieved by a differing combination of shutter speed and aperture, but we knew that, right? The faster the shutter speed, the bigger aperture (hole) you need to balance out the exposure. Selecting a large (wider) aperture lets in more light, so you’ll need to speed up the shutter speed so that it’s not open as long, reducing the amount of light to balance it out.

So to recap, at any one time, you’ve got several choices of aperture and shutter speed you can choose that will all give a satisfactory result. The difference between all of those settings for a car photographer will be whether you need to have the shot frozen and pin sharp, or whether you’re looking to create blur for effect. You’ve probably guessed that you control those things with the shutter speed. Perhaps less obvious is that by using different apertures, you can control which parts of the shot are in focus and which aren’t. Why would you want to do that? It’s called ‘depth of field’ and by controlling depth of field you can give emphasis to the part of the subject you want to. You see this effect every time you watch a movie drama on TV and you see it in photographs, particularly action shots, all the time.

Film Speed – Film You What?

Finally, the other thing that has an effect on exposure is what used to be film speed, but is now sensor ISO. Modern digital SLR’s have stunning sensors with the ability to deliver lovely shots in low light at settings that used to be virtually useless just a couple of years ago. It used to be the case that if you’d run out of options in low light by slowing down the shutter and opening up the aperture, you were pretty screwed if you couldn’t use a strobe. Today, DSLR’s come with superb sensors that allow you to increase sensor ISO and keep on juggling the settings in ways you never could before. In short, you’ve never had it so good! That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have good flash technique, but that’s a subject for another post.

So that’s the basics out of the way, time to figure out what effect you’re looking for.

Controlling Aperture

You’ve probably seen the pin sharp, head on shot like this one. The car jumps out of the background due to it being pin sharp but the background is soft and out of focus, allowing the eye to concentrate on the main subject. This is Sandro Munari, driving a Lancia Stratos at Goodwood and was shot on my Canon 1DS with the brilliant 70-200 f2.8 zoom. Wider apertures of course mean faster shutter speeds, making it perfect for head on action shots like this. The EXIF show the following info: F4.5, 1/1300 sec.

At the opposite end of the scale, this shot of a car leaving the start line was shot with quite a small aperture to slow down the shutter speed and create motion blur. Subarus aren’t the most exciting cars to photograph sometimes, as their four wheel drive system stops them sliding around at extreme angles, so they can look a bit boring in stills shots, even though they’re great fun to drive and supremely quick. By catching the car as it launches off the line, it’s squatting down as the weight moves to the rear, plus the slow shutter speed allows some blur to give an impression of speed. There’s also a flash gun involved in this shot, but we’ll talk about that later. Camera EXIF here shows aperture at f22 and 1/100 sec shutter.

Controlling Shutter Speed

Anyone thinking of car photography for the first time automatically assumes that you’re going to need a fast shutter speed, particularly for action. After all, these cars are fast, so you need to stop it, right? True, but the danger you have with going that route is that too fast a shutter speed and the car just looks like it’ s parked. Cars look best when they’re moving and some of the most exciting action shots are often shot at slower shutter speeds to give a greater impression of speed. Getting lost? Flick back to the earlier section on exposure. You know, the bits you skipped past..

So how slow is slow and how fast is fast? That’s what you need to figure out and that takes a little experience, but don’t worry, it will come. To get you started, here’s a few examples of motion blur and the settings used to get them.

This is a tracking shot I particularly like of a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. It was shot at just 1/40th second, travelling at around 35 mph. The combination gives a smoothly blurred road and spinning wheels for speed, but the car is pin sharp. So sharp, it’s possible to read ‘Mitsubishi’ in the brake calipers.


This panning shot of a Corolla Word Rally Car was on a frozen lake in Norway. By using a slower shutter speed and panning the shot, the car remains sharp, but the background is blurred giving a true representation of the speed the car was driving at on the frozen lake. I’ll be covering panning techniques specifically later and also shooting in very low temperatures, but for now, that’s the basics of shutter speed and aperture.

You can see how a fast shutter speed is actually undesirable much of the time for car photography and that can be a difficult concept for someone just starting out to get their head around, especially if you’re used to setting “P” on your control dial. But have the courage to move out of of the auto mode and you’ll be rewarded with more control over what comes out of your camera and better results all round.

Have you got any great shots that show good shutter or aperture technique? Head over to the Driving Images Flickr group and show them off, or use the email signup box at the top right here to be kept up to date with the latest site updates.

Tagged as: aperture, car action photography, car photo tips, Car Photography, car photography camera settings, shutter speed, tutorials