The Challenges of Motorsport Photography With Jamey Price

Motorsport photography is a niche of the craft that is not only underappreciated — at least in my opinion — but is far more difficult than it gets credit for. In this video, an expert motorsport photographer gives you a breakdown of what it's like to do it for a living.

I've been a car guy since I could talk, and it has never waned. So, naturally, when I started photography, it was a countdown until I started doing car photography of some description. This began with a drift event where I was almost splattered courtesy of a tyre blowout, but eventually, I ended up shooting a hill climb event in London every year.

Before the first year, I had really locked in on learning the panning technique and got to a reasonable standard, but I was in for a real shock when I tried to do it in a race setting. Firstly, racing lines rarely run parallel to you, which is bad for focus. Secondly, cars accelerate and brake aggressively, which is also bad for nailing focus. Thirdly, even with a press pass, finding the right part of a small hill climb track to do what you're trying is tremendously difficult. What's more, mistakes can be costly. Each car did three runs, and they were each on my part of the track for a few seconds. So, with a high miss rate, it isn't impossible to have no good shots of one particular car, and when you're trying to sell images of the cars to their drivers, that's less than ideal.

Have you ever tried motorsport photography? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.