I like to photograph a lot of different things, depending on what I am up to, but my subjects are most often quite stable, the inside of my own mind excluded. I am open to different sorts of photography and I want to always learn more and expand my skillset. Photography is a great hobby for me because in theory, I should never get bored of it because there are so many different aspects to it.

I’m most concerned about finding the good light and not so much of even what is in said light. I hate photographing in the mid-day sun and I usually just abandon my camera during the daytime. This weekend I didn’t have the option to shoot only at sunset or sunrise, if I wanted to photograph rally cars.

I have a soft spot for motorsports and I wanted to do justice for the amazing sport by capturing the speed to my camera. This weekend I really concentrated on trying to learn and practice as much sport photography as I could, and get over the distaste of photography in the harsh sunlight.

Sports photography is totally a different species from what I normally do, and I had to try and not get stuck on doing the same thing I would do when doing street photography or portrait work. One might think that capturing fast moving objects would require using a fast shutter speed as the first value you set, and sure you can do so, but that will freeze all the motion. It makes the cars look still and it’s not so great when the actual speed is more than 150km/h.

I got a few really good tips from a sports photographer and he helped me to find a follow focus from my camera. That was the most important tip I think I got. He also explained me the basic concept of a pan shot. There wasn’t many spots where I could utilize it but I think I got at least some sort of hang on it. It’s pretty hard and I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my own photography. It was really tough to try and find the sweet spot where there would be enough motion blur in the background and wheels but have the majority of the car is focus.

My favourite photographs I got from the weekend were the ones where I did use a fast shutter speed, and all the movement was frozen, but the feel of speed came from the dust cloud that followed the cars on dry dirt roads.

In sports photography you of course have to be prepared to miss a lot of shots too, because these things are fast and if you are close like I was for the shot above, it's almost like playing the lottery to try and capture the car in frame.

This last shot is taken during the rally weekend too, but instead the subjects is a dirt bike. We were in a traffic jam with our car and suddenly I saw a bike up in the air between trees, and dad encourages me to jump out and get a few pics. The line wasn’t moving much anyways so I would have time. Out I ran and got a few shots of the guy training motorcross.

I have no idea who he is and I think I might have scared him because he only drove two laps after I appeared with my camera. Sorry, can’t pass a photo opportunity. I did try to look up if I could find him with the number on the bike but no such luck.

I mainly used my Sigma 50-100mm f/1.8 lens for the weekend and even when it doesn’t have image stabilisation, it’s amazing for sports! I have a crop sensor camera so the 100mm end actually gets quite close, and because the quality is awesome, I can easily crop the picture a lot without loosing detail. The focus is insanely fast and even when I wasn’t prepared for the shot, as long as I was fast enough to point the camera towards the speeding car, the camera caught it perfectly. There really wasn’t many times when it would miss, and if it would, it was because I wasn’t fast enough, of that there were trees of people distracting the follow focus.

This post has a collection of different sorts of shots I got during the weekend, and there are more in my posts I already published earlier, and there will be more once I get through all the photographs I took.

How do you think I did on my first real attempt on sports photography?