Efini RX7 Type-R (JDM Mazda RX7 twin turbo)

Photo was taken by sticking my head and camera out my passenger side

window while my fiance drove my car. I'm happy with the results as

was the RX7's owner.

 

Any comments, ratings, and suggestions are appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Aaron

its only foreground "interest" if its interesting - grey, out of focus tarmac is not. Crop to square from the bottom and see this really come to life.

Thanks for the suggestion, Peter. I'll give a square crop a try when I have a chance.

I am sorry, I am not going to praise this. It's an ok frontal snap of a car. There is really nothing to tell about the speed so you could have shot this both you and the car standings still. If you are going to shoot from car to car you should aim to exposure times 1/10 .. 1/30 to get the speed. I also advice you to use fairly short focal length and not too much distance. This way the tarmac seems to go faster.

Wait a sec and I'll go into my archives to give you an example...

Thanks for the ideas, Juha. I'll have to give that a try next time my buddy is up here with one of his cars. A slower shutter speed, having the lead car diagonal (or even beside) to the car I'm photographing, and having both cars going the same speed would give a much better sense of speed. I guess that would be the moving equivalent of a panning shot. So that photo you posted, Juha, was taken from a moving car? How were you able to keep your subject so crisp, or was the road that smooth? :)

Aaron, if the road is even it is not a problem because you can find a lot of undisturbed support for elbows and your upper body. You can also use "sandbags" or beanbags to reduce the high frequency vibrations - which on an even road are not too severe anyway. If you have a station wagon you can also shoot directly backwards and another nice option is a sunroof which will give you another angle.

Also remember that the thumbrule for the slowest sharp phot is the inverse of the focal length: if you have a 60 mm (kino size) lense you can use 1/60 s easily and if you use 28 mm you can use 1/30 easily. With some practice you can actually stretch this rule a bit so that you can go with , say, 40 mm to 1/20 .. 1/30 without too much problems. Sure, it gets statistical the slower you go. It means you have to take more shots to get one right. With the Z4 shots I used anything from 1/10 to 1/30 and the success ratio was surprisingly high. We drove about 80 km/h (50 mph). If I recall right some 3/4 ... 4/5 of the shots were sharp. So I guess a car is actually rather a stable shooting platform.