Virginia International Raceway

October 11, 2024  •  Leave a Comment

Hey Ya'll! Hope you're having a great week! Me? Pretty good. This week I want to talk about a little photo trip that I took to Virginia International Raceway located near Danville Virginia. My Photography wingman Robert came up with this trip months ago and we tried to go once before but I had some medical problems and we had to turn around and come back home. But this time I'm doing great and we took the 2 hour drive to get to this Raceway. I am NOT a car guy or a race guy and really don't know anything about racing . This is more of a road racing type of course with lots of turns hills not just an oval track. Which I kind of like. When we arrived we got inline with all the other cars but we were different. You look at the line of cars and they go Porsche, Porsche, BMW, Audi and then us a Volvo station wagon then Corvette. These people were race and sports car people. LOL We got parked in the infield of the Raceway which is very large and spread out. They have places for camping and RV parking for those folks who want to park their RV and sit and relax to watch the race. There is a big speaker system and you could hear the announcers talking about the racing that was going on. And they had an accent . More European than American. So the place has a cool vibe and the roar of the race cars even boost it even more.

Now shooting this is at least for me was kind of difficult. You can walk around and find you a good spot and if you have a decent Long range telephoto you can really isolate the cars. But the problem is that they move pretty fast. If you crank up your Shutter speed you can get a really nice sharp photo. But the car looks like it's parked on the raceway. To get it to show motion you have to be able to Pan your shots which isn't as easy as it seems. I tried many ways to do this . First I put my shutter on high speed to shoot many shots hoping I get one in focus. Hard to believe this didn't work too well.  I tried slowing down my shutter speed and shutter on high and still didn't get the in focus shot I wanted with everything blurred. I tried using wider lens but still didn't get the sharp car with everything else blurred. Then I tried to shoot Single shot and just shoot one shot as the car came by panning my camera and this seemed to work better for me. I started getting sharper shots with blurry all around but not a lot. So you have the panning shot which is really fun but there are others to get . One is in the pit area where they prepare the cars and fix them if they get crunched up a little. I really liked this as well. Lots of neat stuff that you don't normally see. If you like shooting people there are lots of interesting ones to see and take photo's of. Now this was a practice day and qualifying day for the race teams so you got lots of different classes of cars to look at and see. They all looked pretty amazing to me not knowing much about racing.

Would I do this again. You bet and now I know what to expect maybe I could get some better photos than what I got this time. I had a great time with my wingman Robert and we both got some good shots but struggled a little. If you get a chance to photograph a race or something similar I would highly recommend. So until next week Get out and Shoot!


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