What setting should i put my camera on while at the races?

[budagboy2]

Can somebody tell me what setting i should set my camera on, like aperture and shutter speed to take the best pics while cars are in motion. thanks for your help

[TT]

Uhm... you will have to try basically, but if you want to take pics while following the car while it is passing, you won't need a VERY fast shutter... something into the 300 to 600 should do. You will have the car in focus and the background blurred out a bit, depending on the speed. but in that case with automatic cameras it's a bit tricky for the focus (wou will have to manually set it and then shoot the pic at a given moment, you can still do that)
if you want to have the camera fixed on a certain point and shoot the car while passing there, you will need an higher speed, depending also on the speed of the car...
the only time I shoot cars while moving pretty fast was for a rally sprint.. you can see some pics here:

in this one the car was slowing down from probably some 100 to 40 km/h I'd say:
http://www.jabbasworld.net/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=8236&size=big&password=&sort=1&cat=504
so not very fast, but as you can see, with a shutter set at 640 the picture is very sharp

http://www.jabbasworld.net/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=8237&size=big&password=&sort=1&cat=504
still shutter at 640, car moving probably at about 70-80 km/h, still good.

Of course on a sunny day the shutter at 640 is ok, if it would be cloudy, the picture risk to be a but dark..

You just have to practice for the first couple of laps I suppose ;)

what camera do you have BTW?

[budagboy2]

this one, the camera has a fully manual mode so i can set everything to what i want, should i put the aperture at like f2.8 or higher?
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Sony/sony_dscv1.asp

[TT]

well if you will put higer aperture, the shutter will have to be slower, the higher the aperture value, the slower the shutter.. IMO you should let the aperture in auto and only shutter in manual mode.

BTW, editing your previous post with a shorter link to a proper website and not an "official" one ;)

[budagboy2]

thanks for your help TT, will also be video taping some of the races too.

[Toronto]

what race you going to?