Boy you can't have much more fun than riding sportbikes at a racetrack. This was my first time back at the track after my crash last fall. I was overly cautious but by the end of the day I was having a great time. My wife brought her new CBR-600RR to the track for the first time and all three of us had fun riding. Of course my son Adam is way faster than we are, but then again he is faster than most people at the track.

Since I was busy riding I only had time to photograph at Turn 11 in between our sessions. Here you can get very close to the riders and all that is needed is a 200mm lens to get very tightly cropped pictures. I wanted to practice my pan-blur techniques since this takes a LOT of practice to perfect. I wanted to use my SB-800 flash to fill in the shadows as the riders flew past, so I only had one shot per rider. The flash really helps fill in the shadows during this bright sunlit day. I normally shoot full manual and earlier in the session this is what I did (and I like those pictures the best) but since I was busy riding and shooting I switched to to aperture priority just to make things easy.

The key to "pan-blurring" the background is to slow your shutter speed down and then practice your panning. My technique is to treat it like shooting a shotgun. I set my feet to the position of the final image, then rotate at the waist back to where the riders are coming from. This way my body is "wound up" when I first see them, then it unwinds as they move towards my "shoot zone". I then am in my natural well braced shooting stance when I click the shutter, still following through with the pan after the shot, just like you would with a shotgun.