Last time I went to take photos to practice for the track day that Dean will do – see post Cars in Movement – there were a few things that did not please me.

The first was the high ISO. It created a lot of noise in the image. At the size shown, you really can’t see it, but on my laptop, where I can zoom a bit more, it starts becoming very apparent. Because the day was cloudy and it was late (the sun sets a lot earlier this time of the year), it pushed the camera to put on higher ISO.

The second thing is the fact that the “good photos” all seem like the cars are still, which isn’t true. The intent is to show movement and still have a significant part of the car (or moving object) in focus. If the wheels were a bit blurry, indicating it was spinning, then it would achieve the purpose of the photo. That’s why I decided to do a second attempt at taking photos of traffic.

So today I worked a bit on both: the ISO was significantly lower (400 and 100) as well as I made some of the cars look like they were in movement. The third requirement was to have the whole car in the photo. That was a bit difficult in most cases becase I stood about the same distance as last time, but used a zoom slightly higher, between 350-400mm of focal length.

All in all, I’m happy with the results, but still need to work more on it.