Motor Racing Photography

WilbaW wrote:

I can't give you definitive answers to all your questions, but here's a few things...

The "good" shots are at 1/250, whereas the "poor" shots are at 1/125 and 1/160. Maybe you just need to use a shorter shutter until you get better at it? The lack of sharpness in the "poor" shots looks to me more like motion blur than focus error or lack of depth of field. I'm not sure what blur due to the action of the IS system looks like, but I suspect it would be more like intermittent jumps than ordinary too-slow-shutter blur.

The challenge with panning vehicles is you can't shoot with a really short shutter (like 1/2000) because it will look like the car is standing still, particularly if the wheels are frozen. The wheel blur in the 1/250 shots is fine, so maybe treat that as a minimum. I often get enough at 1/400 with faster moving cars (some examples in my Cars album).

If you're going to use IS, set it to mode 2. The manual for your lens says "MODE 2 provides image stabilization only in the direction of camera movement." It doesn't say that movement can't be diagonal, but it's worth doing some tests to see if there's a difference in that case between the two modes and off. (I've not got around to doing that. I've always used mode 2 with my 70-300L and got great results.)

With two cars, even if you have them both within the depth of field, you're not going to get both of them sharp because they are moving relative to the camera at different rates. Just pick one (generally the closest), track that, and let the other be background.

+1 what the others have written.  Don't get fancy trying to drag your shutter on those distant diagonal shots.  Increase your shutter speed significantly and your results will improve greatly.

You don't mention your AF settings, but use AI Servo with the center AF point.

R2