Sports Photography: Race Car Shoot - Photography Business Tips

Grand prix

Recently I was invited by Windsor Life Magazine to do a photo layout of the Detroit Grandprix held on September 02/07 on Belle Isle. I gained valuable experience and information in this highly competitive area of sports photography. Panning your shots is extremely important and very useful to capture a screaming indy car going past you at 160 miles an hour.

I used a Nikon D200 mounted with a 70 – 200 mm lens with VR and I shot the photos at iso 200 at f5.6 five frames per second 3200ths of a second shutter speed. The photos were excellent.

The equipment that I brought along: My camera bag was a backpack style which proved very useful as it allowed me to carry everything I needed for the event, such as extra batteries, extra memory cards, extra lenses for shooting celebrities, filters if I needed them, monopod and a spare camera if anything were to happen with my main tool. The back pack is the way to go because you strap it on your back and don’t have to worry about lugging all your equipment around by hand which can become very heavy.

Do not bring a tripod to these types of events as they will only get in the way of other fans, use a mono pod.

Shoot as many photos as you can because you are bound to have some bad shots but believe me the good ones make up for the bad.

Give me speed...

I was fortunate to be able to get my shots along with the rest of the press corps, but don’t let it discourage you if you can’t get a press pass because you can still get great shots from the grandstand as I did. Here are some more tips on taking action shots and sports photography.

I found some of my better shots were taken from the very top of the main grandstand and all I needed was a very good telephoto lense to do the job.

When you go to one of these events you need to scout the area for your best vantage point and then have fun and and just keep firing that shutter button.

I took 450 photos on this event. You can view some of the photos on my website at www.timelypics.com The race photos are located in my gallery titled Grandprix. Further to this article, today I was just informed by Windsor Life Magazines’ publisher he was excited to put me on his magazines list of photographers. These events that have happened to me can happen to anyone that has a strong passion to become a pro photographer and takes the necessary basic steps to starting up that ladder to professionalism.

Step 1: Take some photography courses at an accredited college.

Step 2: Enter as many photo contests as possible.

Step 3: Build a portfolio of approximately 20 8×10 photos printed at a photo shop (your best photos only ).

Step 4: Show the portfolio to everyone you can

Step 5: Every photographer has a niche such as weddings, pet photography portraits, landscapes etc., find your niche, basiclly what you do best at.

Step 6: Choose a photographer that inspires you. It’s okay to copy that photographers technique as no two photos are the same.

Step 7: Have some business cards made up.

Step 8: Have some flyers made up about your photography and pass them out, make yourself known.

...and the winner is

I truly hope that I have inspired some budding photographers and their hearts to go after their dreams, it happened to me and it can happen to you. Don’t worry about the competition let them worry about you. Keep on shutterbugging. Contributor Thomas Danyluk

I looked around and I think this guide (link below) is the best piece of instructional content for action sports photography at the time of writing this. I noticed they are prepared to be contacted for extra assistance too. Not many suppliers will go to those lengths these days. Also, they have an extract you can download which gives you an idea of the content you would receive after purchase. If you’re considering making a business from sports or action photography or just improving existing skills, you should read this specific and dedicated guide to sports photography which you can purchase and download now.

Here are additional action and sports photography related articles;

If you want to find this article again, you can bookmark it below.

You may also like