2012 AMA Motocross – Freestone
Freestone County Raceway is about an hour and a half south of Dallas and it holds one of the national AMA Motocross rounds. A friend and I went down there for race day and took a few pictures.
This was the first Motocross race I’ve been to and I really enjoyed it. I like the more open, less vertical aspects compared to Supercross. From a photo perspective its hard to beat, I was able to get as close to the track as I wanted. Low fences everywhere and the jumps really let you play around with pictures more than at road races.
One thing I had noticed looking at various dirtbike pictures is the shutter speed most photographers use is quite high, especially when compared to normal motorsport photography. Motion blur is usually the only cue in a picture that a race car on a track is going fast, otherwise it looks parked. With dirtbikes, the lean angle, dirt roost, and of course being airborne are all cue for speed regular cars don’t have. I think this leads to most dirtbike photographs having a high shutter speed to catch the roost and the action. As someone who typically photographs cars on track this troubles me. There’s gotta be motion blur!
I made it a point to keep my shutter speed pretty low for most of these shots. I was at 1/60th – 1/80th for most side pan shots. I jumped to 1/100 – 1/200 for shots of bikes going away and coming towards me, which is still low for cars moving “with” the camera. I even tried a few pan/zoom shots to get a subtle motion blur while bikes were moving “with” the camera.
The pictures!
Tags: motorsport