Went to my first WRC rally on Friday and it was amazing! We managed to find a pretty much empty hairpin in SS5/8 and were able to shoot from the roadside, a couple meters away from the cars (which was relatively safe given the layout). This shot of Elfyn Evans' Fiesta was taken with a Canon 1300D at F7, 800ISO and a shutter speed of 1/80. I both like panning and am forced to shoot using smaller apertures as my 28-80 kit lens has horrible sharpness at max aperture but is my only usable wide angle with working autofocus; I feel like this shot turned out pretty good, any criticism?
That's really excellent! As far as the panning and speed I think it's spot on. Enough blur in the background to convey speed but enough clarity for context. The jaunty angle of the car in mid slide is great. The front of the car looks a little dark to me but I think my phone really crushes shadows so if it looks good to you it probably is good. It's a shame the back of the car isn't quite in focus because the crisp lines on the front fender is a nice focal point of the shot. But it doesn't significantly detract and maybe contributes to the feel of the power slide.
Oh damn I didn't check on this post for a while, sorry for the very late answer and thanks for your kind words! I think you're right about the picture being a little dark, sadly working with quite an entry level DSLR and a pretty bad lens means I can't get my ISO much higher than 800, and my aperture is limited. Bringing up shadows more probably caused too much grain to appear.
About the back of the car being blurry, it's a side effect of the car sliding during panning and I couldn't do much about it in camera (I could have frozen the car with a faster shutter speed and added blur in post process, but I'm way too much of a noob for that :D).
Glad someone enjoyed the picture!