2009-05-22 Racing (darkness)

Shooting drag racing in the dark is a challenge. If I was selling pictures I would not shoot at all in the dark, I’d do the easy daytime shot (most folks would not buy a grainy evening shot).

To shoot in the dark there are three things that are important. The first is you want to have a fast enough shutter speed to capture the action. 1/250th is generally fine. Everything else you set on the camera is making sure you have enough light to use that shutter speed.

To compensate for the darkness you open the lens wide. I have been using f/2.8 lenses for the most part but also own f/1.8 and f/1.4 prime lenses. The lower the number the better the lens will shoot in the dark. Most of the consumer lenses when zoomed in are shooting f/5.6.

The other thing that is adjusted is called the ISO. During the day I usually use 100 ISO. As it starts to get dark I move the ISO to 800, then 1600, 3200 and finally 6400. I could go to 12,800 but there is little quality at that ISO. Even at 1600 the image needs to be post-processed to remove the noise. The color quality suffers also, some pictures look spotty.

I also noticed shooting on the North side of the track towards the tower has better light. It still isn’t enough to get the shots right. By the way, this is not limited to North Star Dragway. I shot at Crandall (which has the state of the art everything) and its still a challenge.

The answer is strobes but they need to be positioned quite high (probably roof level, so the guard rails don’t block the light) and behind the driver (so its not annoying).

I’ll continue to experiment with various configurations in the dark. Most folks wouldn’t post this junk but I like burning up internet bandwidth.

Almost forgot. One other challenge at night is the smoke from the burnouts. There are a couple good examples of post burnout before the wind blows the smoke away.

UPDATE: I just started loading Saturday's daytime pictures to the 2009-05-23 area. The clarity, etc compared to photos in the dark is dramatic.