How To: Capturing Action

The key to capturing a sense of action in your shot is picking the right shutter speed, and then panning the camera to follow the action. In the shot of the motocross rider, a shutter speed of 1/250 freezes ALMOST all the action. You want a little bit of motion blur somewhere, so the rider doesn't look like he's suspended on a string. 1/250 lets the spokes of the wheels blur, but keeps the rest of the image sharp. Most digital SLR's have "continuous focus" modes and a mulifunction button on the back that will let you pick which part of the image you want the autofocus to lock in on. I selected a zone on the right side of the frame, then turned the camera vertical to get the shot. With continuous autofocus tracking the rider, the camera fired off 4 shots of him in the air, and two more of the landing, all perfectly focused. Not all shots lend themselves to autofocus, however.

In the bottom shot of a motorcycle roadracer, the bikes moving away from me at over 100 mph were more than the autofocus in my Nikon 300mm f2.8 lens could handle. I picked a spot at the apex of the corner, and prefocused the camera on that spot using manual focus. When the rider came down the straightaway, I panned with him, keeping the rider centered in the frame. When he got to the apex of the corner, making sure to keep panning, I fired off a this shot at 1/500 .
A 1/500 shutter speed usually will freeze anything, but these bikes move at airplane speeds, and there's still enough motion blur from the panning to capture a sense of how fast these guys really are.