I was lucky enough to be able to attend the 2010 Indy 500 via work this past weekend and I have to say I had a fantastic time. I am so impressed by Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and this is after visiting quite a few other race tracks and racing events. I can see that Indy is probably quite a difficult race track to shoot. There’s really nowhere good for professional photographers that allows them to get any kind of shots a fan wouldn’t be able to get themselves. So, attending as what I’ll call “Fan Plus” (I had a pass which allowed me access to the media building on the front straight), I felt quite privileged to be able to see the pitlane, the start/finish line and if I looked behind me from the position I spent most of the race – was also able to see turn two and most of the backstretch.

I couldn’t quite believe how fast the race seemed to pass when I was there… Time flies when you’re having fun!

The huge majority of the photos I took I used a fast shutter speed. This was out of fear of leaving the event with no photos to show for it. So I set the camera to shutter priority mode and cranked it as fast as it would go. I still had to pan with the cars to get a sharp image, but I am happy to see that most of the photos I took that were in focus (out of focus shots have not been uploaded), were sharp.

I did, during the middle of the race, try fully manual and managed to get the shots below, which were taken at a slower shutter speed where the background is blurry and the speed these cars were going is much more apparent.

Most of the photos are like the one below, taken with a very fast shutter speed.

Anyway, I uploaded a gallery of all the 477 photos (there were more, but some I let the focus ring slip and they were blurry) I took over the weekend and you can view the full gallery here.

Something I did not expect was that IMS picked up that I had posted my photo gallery and actually linked to it on their Facebook page! That’s quite an honor and I’m very, very proud!