Panning hit rate?

AndyS2

AndyS2

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When photographing car and bike racing what would be conisdered an acceptable hit rate when panning?

I was at the Mallory Bike Bonanza the other week end and I took loads of pictures, some of which I'm really pleased with ( I'll post them up later ) but my success rate was miserable, I'm guessing well below 10%. I was going to ask about using a monopod, but on ready the thread already started it would seem this is not the answer, so just more practice??
 
Technique and it also depends on what you're going for. No idea about bikes but with cars i can get 95% keepers if I'm shooting at 1/100 but trying to find out how slow you can go really kills the keeper rate for me. But it's alot more fun and if i get one out of fifty at 1/10 then I'm a happy camper.
 
Just checked my last event, Drift demo at TRAX a couple of weeks ago:

Shooting between 1/40 and 1/80, Canon 7D

670 shots
122 keepers
10 worthy of sharing (a lot of the keepers were sharp but had colours muted by tyre smoke)

I'd rather 1% I really like than 90% which are ok so I keep the shutter speed low.
 
Hit rate is a really hard thing to ask about as the acceptability level varies so much from person to person. I'm a fussy person who has a bad habit of pixel peeping, as such the amount of photos I'll upload from an event is fairly low, about 10% usually.

The only advice I can offer is to keep practising until you get to a level that you're happy with, then just keep on practising some more.
 
I recently shot my first motorsport even (Lotus Trackday) and much like the OP was rather disappointed with my hit rate (again, around the 10% mark, of which only about 20% of that made it to my Flickr), but being my first event i suppose thats not too bad

I was varying from 1/90th up to about 1/180th, but the majority of my favourite keepers were the ones i had nailed at the slower 1/90th shutter speed, i nailed more sharp shots at the higher shutter speed, but the motion blur was much less than that of the lower SS

Now i just need more events to practice at
 
Bikes tend to be more forgiving than cars at higher shutter speeds... you have to compete with the independent movement of bike and rider, so in my experience you are better off above 1/320...

works ok even at 1/500...
On the Limit by Jonny Henchman, on Flickr

Depends on a lot of things, practice will help but the slower you go the more it'll drop...

I did a session at the F1 at under 1/20 ss.... must have shot about 600 frames and got about 6 I was happy with... 1% whoop whoop

...you can always just try and embrace the blur... beauty in the eye of the beholder and all that...
James Ellison by Jonny Henchman, on Flickr

...PS apparently i'm the weirdo that uses a monopod to pan (I thought it was normal)
 
It's whatever you're comfortable with, basically, and that depends entirely on what the images are for. I think of it pretty matter of factly these days...how many pictures from that event am I ever likely to look back on in 1, 2, 5 years time? The answer is about 5, at best, and only then because they end up in my big photo yearbook or hang around towards the top end of my Flickr stats or something.

It's also massively impacted by how you shoot, I'm a 'single shot' kinda guy as I like to focus on one sharp panning shot, but if you prefer to give your FPS a workout your hit-rate is likely to nosedive, but understandably so.

I average 1000 photos at an event, 80-90% of those are normally shot at shutter speeds of 1/60 or slower, and a large percentage of those are 1/30 or slower. I might have 200 to work with that aren't immediately binned due to sharpness issues, that quickly becomes less than 100 from a cull whilst looking at composition, which becomes less than 50 if there are duplicates (i.e. the same car in similar positions, or cars that just don't interest me).

Generally speaking they have to be absolute nailed on sharp when viewed full size to not get binned, it's very easy to create a sharp looking panning shot at 800px wide, but that's cheating (in my opinion). Often that may only mean a small area in sharp focus as if the car is not parallel, if that's the case I normally only keep ones where the precise section I was aiming for sharpness is nailed (quite often the very front end).

Motors TV Raceday by Chris Harrison, on Flickr
 
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