Mac K Photography *Racing and Panning Shots*

  • Thread starter Mac K
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Everytime I come into this thread your panning shots are always spot on... Cars are always in focus with amazing detail... Impressive 👍 Red corvette looks mean as hell! :D
 
Love the smoking RX-7. :D

We had a guy that ran with an RX-7 in Colorado at track days, and his would do the same thing. We always joked around that we didn't have to worry about mosquito's during track days. :lol:
 
You're panning is spot on. Holy smokes.

But everything feels just a touch under exposed, details being lost in those shadows.
 
Mac K
Thanks guys, is that a common issue on RX-7s like that? The car was doing it every lap and eventually just pulled off the track:P
Click to expand...

If they are running pre-mix (2-stroke oil mixed in with the fuel) then yeah, they'll smoke a lot, especially if they are running a higher amount of oil in the mix. Great for lubrication, bad for mosquito's. :dopey:
 
Great panning... but why do you continue to under expose by a stop to half a stop? So much detail is being lost in the darker parts.
 
Azuremen
Great panning... but why do you continue to under expose by a stop to half a stop? So much detail is being lost in the darker parts.
Click to expand...

What do you mean? Care to explain further?
 
Mac K
What do you mean? Care to explain further?
Click to expand...

There are no true whites in your pictures and all the of the areas in a bit of shadow are black. I checked with the exif and histagram, and it would seem the metering is just telling it to expose a bit under.

And it looks there is a lot of sharpening being done, which makes for some odd grain.

Do you just shoot jpeg or RAW as well?
 
Mac K, it's a metter of taste, and what you'd like to display. I mentioned when I posted previously that I thought personally that they were too saturated. You replied that you do it on purpose for some "pop." That's fine. It does make them pop a little bit, reminds me of a certain magazine page style, I guess.

Azureman's question about underexposure and detail loss comes from the fact that lowering light levels in the image makes dark items go into the obscurity of solid black, which results in loss of detail. For example, the Lotus in post 49, there is a hole in the bodywork in front of the rear wheel, where the engine sits, yet we see nothing of the engine itself, maybe some header pipes. That's the "loss of detail" he speaks of. Whether that's done in the camera by underexposure, or in Photoshop (or whatever) by levels, shifting the light levels down clips the darker areas of the image. You can't get darker than black, it can only drop so far without losing part of the image.

The sharpening he's talking about may make the images look better when small enough to fit on the screen, but going to your Flickr page on loading the full-size images clearly shows the noise pattern that results from sharpening. There are no uniform colors anywhere, and I don't think the camera's sensor is bad enough to do that itself.

If you're not examining the image full-size after sharpening, you may not even have realized what's being done.
 
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@Azure: Oh ok, thanks for clearing that up. I shoot Jpeg, I tried RAW and for some reason I didn't like the way my shots were turning out, so I went back to Jpeg.

@wfooshee: I usaulally sharpen up my photos in Photoshop Lightroom. They look fine on my computer (I view my photos in a program from Nikon called ViewNX) and on Flickr. The darker areas might be my fault, I was experimenting with different shutter speeds, etc while shooting, so I guess it was bound to happen. It also helps to know what lenses I used, which maybe wasn't the best choice for panning, but it does quite well for my needs and I never intended to try panning shots at the time of purchase..

Any further advice any of you have would be greatly appreciated, I'll be honest and say I won't take it all, because I like to experiment on my own and I have my own unique "shooting style and editing process", but I'll try my best to use most of the advice it in my future shots. On that note.


Lines of Beauty by Mac K Photography, on Flickr
 
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I took the liberty of downloading your #59 Porsche from your Flickr album, at its full size. Here are a couple of sections of that image. You can see that at this size, none of the color areas are uniform in color, but have "static" in them, almost like video noise. (Make sure to click the "click to enlarge" button to get to actual size of the image resolution.)

Well, that's basically exactly what it is, and it's an artifact from the sharpening process. Sharpening looks for edges and amplifies them, making the edges harsher, for lack of a better word. At a small scale it appears to enhance the image, making it look . . . well, sharper! I've traded in my D50 for a D5000 (actually found a good deal on one on eBay, the D5000 had less than 3000 shutter trips on it, most of the accessories were still in their packaging, and then I sold my D50 on eBay, ended up trading up for about 200 bucks!) Well, back from digressing, my point is that I know the D5000's sensor is better than what your image shows.

At sizes small enough for display on a monitor the sharpening noise is not noticable, but if you were to try to print one of these at a reasonable "framing" size, the noise would become very noticable and probably result in a disappointing image. You also get "ghosts" in the image, as seen on the windshield wiper, the black radio antenna on the roof, and the bottom edge of the door. Another edge enhancement artifact is visible at the front edge of the rear wing.

While you're using the sharpen task, switch to actual size once in a while to keep track of how much noise the process is adding.

In a positive vein, I certainly can't fault your panning motion at all! Do you find yourself getting one good shot out of several, and these are the ones that worked? For myself, on a bad day I might have only 10% usable pan shots, and on a good day it'll be up to one in four or one on three. The others will have too much motion blur in the subject.

MacKPorsche1.jpg


MacKPorsche2.jpg


Looking forward to seeing more stuff, and don't take this stuff to mean I don't like your pics. I'm just trying to answer your "care to explain" question to Azureman and maybe show you some stuff going on that you might not even have realized.
 
For comparison, here is a 100% crop from a shot of mine.

5bBG7.jpg


Click to see the fullsize. You will notice that the grain is not present, and this isn't really the result of the lens and camera combo I am using. And the exposure is a bit higher, which allows for more detail in the car and in the wheel wells, tires, and brakes.

And keep in mind with RAW you get quite a bit more data. The color correction options in post alone are worth shooting in it. For example, I was able to get this...

mPeF5.jpg


From this by using RAW for color correction and level adjustments.

MxrLR.jpg


In jpeg, I don't think I'd have gotten the same quality in the results. More data can also be recovered from over and underexposed regions when shooting in RAW versus jpeg.
 
Thanks a lot guys, I really appreciate it, and I understand where I was going "wrong". I'll take some of your advice for my future shots, thanks again.
 
RAW files certainly need more memory than JPGs, but it's worth every byte. They're bigger because all the image data remains, even if it's not quite visible at first glance.

A compressed format like JPG can be edited for lightness, saturation, levels and so on, but you cannot recover anything that isn't there. The only thing you can do is artificially enhance it (i.e. sharpen) which adds artifacts of its own, without actually adjusting anything in the exposure.

Not being familiar with Lightroom I googled it to see if it works with RAW files and found this, which is a very nice tutorial on RAW files in Lightroom, and why they're better to work with.

A RAW file that's too dark can be lightened up a little bit, and stuff that was buried in the black will become visible. A JPG image that gets lightened up just gets noisy in the black areas, maybe a mottled gray.

Depending on your OS, you may not be able to preview RAW files in an OS window. There are downloads all over the place to fix that, look around for "raw file preview" or "raw thumbnail," things like that, so when you open a folder full of RAW files you can see the thumbnails.

(Doesn't work on my system on the card in the camera, though, but I can preview them once copied to the PC. I find Nikon Transfer and ViewNX to be really cumbersome.)
 
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