As Aimee mentioned in her last column, we swapped venues for a bit: she was chained to her desk, knee-deep in color-management woes, while I desperately tried to keep up with race cars zipping around the Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway. Thanks to Canon, some fellow digerati and I got a chance to capture the action down on the track, lens to lens with the pros. In addition to getting to shoot with a great camera, the EOS 1D Mark II, the experience reminded me why I generally prefer subjects that don't move much. So I'll be putting my discussion of digital asset management on hold until after I get back from the Consumer Electronics Show in early January, at which point we'll dig into the process of organizing all those photos and videos you took over the holidays. Instead, I will pass on the lessons I learned--and relearned--about shooting action.
- It's hard. Whether it's a car zooming around a track at 180mph or a kid loping across a soccer field at 2mph, getting the shot still requires tons of practice. When you learn to parallel park a car, it takes a while before you develop a feel for how far forward to start, the correct angle to back up into the spot, when to start straightening the wheels, and so on. Shooting action takes the same sort of feel, and each type of action--soccer game and car race--feels different. You have to be in The Zone, and like your happy place, you have to find it first.
- Timing is everything. The real key to getting that shot is being able to subconsciously predict where the subject is going to be at your prime photo-op moment. Stretch your precognitive muscles by shooting warm-up laps, batting practice, drills, and other situations where the photos don't matter. That helps you get a sense of how and where individuals and vehicles move.
- You have to follow through. One of the key action-shooting techniques you'll need to master is panning, and the key to successful panning is follow-through. As with a golf swing, where you have to swing through, not at, the ball, you have to pan smoothly through the desired composition. At least with digital photography you don't have to waste a lot of film to do this right.
- Don't think too much. When you've practiced sufficiently, you have to relax and let your muscle memory take over. If you think about your golf swing, you immediately ruin it by tensing and jerking through what should be a smooth path.
- Go where it's slow. The players have to slow down when changing direction, at least by the laws of this universe, and those can even be some of the most interesting moments. Position yourself near the basket to capture a basketball player's hang time, the second after the bat hits the ball, the cyclist taking a hairpin curve, or the snowboarder catching air.
- More is better. One drawback to digital cameras is the false sense of security they give you, not just in terms of image storage but in photo quality. All but the blurriest photos look sharp on those little LCDs, even if you zoom in closely. Since the best action-photo compositions combine sharp and blurred elements, the absence of any sharp elements can ruin an otherwise interesting photo. So delete only obviously blurry photos in camera, and make sure you have multiple versions that you think might be sharp.
- Stability matters. If you don't have one already, spring for a monopod. They're easier to pan with than tripods, and that way, you don't have to worry about making sure the horizon is level (my most frequent shooting glitch) or accidentally lowering the camera slightly and ending up with the subject in the wrong place in the frame.
- Accept your limitations. We get zillions of complaints about shutter lag and other performance issues with digital cameras. The truth is, unless you can afford to spend more than $1,500 on a camera, you're going to run into some type of speed issue: shutter lag, buffer bottleneck, limits on the number of frames in continuous-shooting mode, and so on. So you have to adjust your shooting style and expectations to match your hardware limitations. For instance, if shutter lag is the problem, prefocus on a particular spot where you think something's bound to happen, and wait for it. Or zoom out all the way to maximize the amount of area the subject has to cover within the frame so that you increase the chance of the shutter firing while they're still in it. And if you still can't get the shots, you may want to switch to a camcorder.
- Action isn't everything. Frankly, I got bored watching the cars endlessly circling, and all my racing photographs had an unavoidable sameness. When shooting video, videographers try their best to shoot B-roll--supplementary footage that they can use to interweave with the main footage. Even if you're shooting stills, always try to get shots of stuff happening on the periphery of the main event. It'll make for a better slide show.
And one bonus lesson: When falling out of a moving vehicle, wrap your body around the $4,500 camera. It's more important than your back.
Interestingly enough, those turn out to be life lessons as well. So there you have it--everything I needed to know about life I learned from shooting race cars.
Got any sports photography stories you'd like to share? We can always use some pointers. 'Fess up in TalkBack.
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Q: Apparently, you reply to reader requests, so here is one: a roundup of point-and-shoot cameras that carry their flashes far enough from the lens to eliminate red eyes. Please talk about this underdiscussed problem.
--Emmanuel M., via e-mail
A: As you indicate, when the flash is close to the lens, a camera becomes susceptible to producing red-eye. Unfortunately, the cause is a bit more complicated than simply the proximity of the two. Red-eye occurs when light passes through the pupil and lens of the subject's eye, bounces off the capillary-packed retina, and returns to the camera lens. The larger and more dilated the pupil, the more severe the red-eye. So to avoid red-eye, you can make sure the subject's pupils contract as much as possible before the flash goes off--that's what most camera's red-eye-reduction preflash does--or keep the reflected light from returning to the camera. Physics dictates that for a perfectly reflective surface, the angle of incidence of a light ray equals its angle of reflection; in other words, what goes in must reflect back at the same angle. If you point the lens directly at the subject's eyes, the angle of reflection increases as you move the flash away from that axis and decreases the chance of red-eye. But there are other ways to increase that critical angle, including getting closer to your subject, shooting at an angle rather than perpendicular to the subject, and diffusing the flash (which scatters the light so that less of it reaches the pupil dead-on). The only way to absolutely guarantee that you won't get red-eye is to use off-camera flash so that you can position it at any angle.
That said, there's a directly proportional relationship between the distance between the flash and the lens and the distance between the camera and the subject. As a rule of thumb, for every foot between you and your subject, you need an inch of separation between the flash and the center of the lens. If we assume that you generally shoot people between three and six feet from you, the separation needs to be greater than three inches. That excludes most point-and-shoot models. The best you can probably do is look at cameras with a pop-up flash. Here are some good, relatively compact models that make the cut.
 Sony Cyber Shot DSC-V1
Olympus C-770 Ultra Zoom
Olympus C-765 Ultra Zoom
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