Focusing help, Auto/Manual

[MikeSun]

First off, I will be mainly shoot action shots of automotibles at the race track or car cruises. My problem here is, say for example I have zoomed in to the car approaching me, but as it comes closer to me and eventually passes me, I have to zoom out in order to keep the car in the frame. How should I go about this?

So far I have been using the auto focus, but I was wondering if there would be an advantage to using the manual focus for this type of situation?

My other question is how do you co-ordinate using the manual focus and zoom together, especially for scenes which are not planned out and happen spontaneously? Is it better off to use auto focusing in this case?

I'd appreciate any help,

Thanks,

Mike

 

[Barry_Green]

Autofocus will not give good results for what you're trying to do. The best thing to do is try to use the right combination of ND filters so that you keep your iris down around f/14. That'll give you huge depth of field and make focus basically irrelevant. If you're up in the stands, meaning at least a couple hundred feet away from the action, you could set the focus on about MF90 or so and just leave it there... with F14 you should have enough depth of field to make basically everything in focus at all times.

After that, it's just down to framing -- proper panning and judicious use of the zoom to keep the frame showing what you want to, and the composition interesting. And that just takes practice practice practice, as well as studying other camerapeople's work. Watch plenty of racing on TV and see how the "pros" do it, notice what you like about how they do it, and then set out to emulate it.