Shooting in bright light

EddieB

EddieB

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Ed
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I was taking some photos yesterday of my Dad's driving experience at Croft race circuit.

Having only been into photography for about 12 months now I've not had the luxury of shooting many motorsport events in bright conditions.

I was finding that where the sun was reflecting off the car was totally blowing out/over exposing.

If I'd adjusted the aperture to compensate then I would have under exposed other areas of the car.

Would a polarising filter fix this?

Cheers

Ed
 
One of the problems with Croft is that the sun is nearly always on the far side of the cars when you're standing in the spectator areas. There's a few places that are okay on a morning but afternoons are harder to work with.
To some degree you just have to accept that it will happen, I'm not sure if a polariser would help a small amount but it certainly won't solve the problem because of how strong the reflection is and how vast the difference is between shade and full sunlight. It's something like eight times as much light (or three stops) if I'm remembering rightly and working my maths out correctly.

Exactly what I would do would depend on where I was standing and the exact angles involved, but you basically need to pick which part of the car is most important and expose to make that part look good.
Don't forget that you can equalise the difference a bit quite quickly with post processing by lightening the shade areas and darkening the highlight areas (as long as they're not too blown out you can recover some detail from them), particularly if you're producing RAW files.

With other subjects you could use some fill flash but flash usually looks ugly when used with moving cars.
 
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Cheers - I was stood on the main straight and it was horrendous so ended up moving round to complex which was a lot better.

Will keep this in mind for next time :)
 
could you not adjust the exposure compensation in your Camera ?? Or would this not help

Les :thumbs:
 
One tip and two strategies:

Tip: Don't shoot into the sun. No matter how good the angle is, shooting into the sun will always suck. Move somewhere else, come back later/earlier in the day to use the lovely angle you've found.

Strategy #1 for difficult light - meter off of the grass in front of you (not the tarmac!), use the exposure lock button (AE lock) to lock off the exposure. Remember to keep checking that its still locked, if the camera goes to sleep, it comes off. Keep checking that the light conditions haven't changed with a re-meter.

Strategy #2 for difficult light - try manual exposure using the Sunny 16 rule together with shooting in RAW. Sunny 16 should get you nearly there, correct as needed in photoshop.
 
desantnik said:
Tip: Don't shoot into the sun. No matter how good the angle is, shooting into the sun will always suck. Move somewhere else, come back later/earlier in the day to use the lovely angle you've found.
Click to expand...

Croft is awkward for the Sun as it's usually on the South side of the circuit and you're usually on the North side of the circuit. For example today the Sun was South of the circuit between 08:00 and 18:00.
If the Sun is to the East (i.e. on a morning) there's a few places like through the Complex, across Hawthorn and at the exit of Sunny (Out) where you can get the Sun on the same side of the cars as you but as the day draws on the Sun moves to the West and ends up the wrong side of the cars. Unfortunately that's when most of the racing takes place but for a track experience day it might not be an issue if it takes place on a morning.
On an afternoon you can stand between Tower and the Chicane and face back toward the Chicane or Hawthorn to get the Sun behind you again but it's a bit bland round there and only ever shooting from one place is boring.
Other than that it's all shooting into the Sun to some degree.

There's a map here for people who don't know the corner names. The start/finish straight runs South to North and the first corner is Clervaux.
 
Never been there, but sounds like a right nightmare.... I guess hope for solid cloud is all you can do!
 
i find a polarizing filter helps for me but thats mostly for the windscreen and you have to be carefull how you use them otherwise you get a nasty rainbow effect in the windsreen all to do with the angle of the sun
 
mike68 said:
i find a polarizing filter helps for me but thats mostly for the windscreen and you have to be carefull how you use them otherwise you get a nasty rainbow effect in the windsreen all to do with the angle of the sun
Click to expand...

Isnt the rainbow effect also caused by race cars having persplex screens rather than glass?
 
Yes that's exactly what causes it
 
Thanks everyone for the feedback - i'll defo take this into consideration when I'm back next for the BTCC. Although I fear our summer has been and about to go :)
 
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