Shooting Fast Alfa Romeo on a Race Track

“The Citroen went into second and remained there; slowly we puffed up the long ascent. We had gone about a mile, when we became aware of a noise coming up from the valley, a noise like the noise of massed machine-guns. It grew louder and louder. A minute later a huge red Alfa Romeo road racer, looking suspiciously like the machine that had just won the Grand Prix d’ Europe, roared past at a speed that cannot have been less than fifty miles an hour. It was evidently being driven by a genius; for, looking up, we saw the scarlet monster negotiating turn after hairpin turn in the zigzag road above us without once abating its speed by one mile an hour. In another thirty seconds it was out of sight.” – Aldous Huxley

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to live an experience similar to that described by Aldous Huxley in his brilliant essay “Along the Road”, as I had access to the Varano de’ Melegari circuit,  in the Emilia Romagna’s Motor Valley, home of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Maserati and Dallara, and (trying) to shoot Alfa Romeo’s monsters such as the Giula and Stelvio Quadrifoglio (2.9 litres V6 Twin Turbo, 520HP RWD, 308 km/h) and the glorious 4C (1750cc, 241HP, 258 km/h).

Panning is what makes shooting fast cars fun and challenging. There is no point – unless you want to – in using a fast shutter speed to freeze a car in motion. Indeed, this shot could easily be replaced with one taken when the 4C was standing still.

In panning, a proper timing in the connection between the eyes and the finger actuating the shutter is essential, for a wrong calculation inevitably leads to capture just an almost or entirely empty track.

Do not confuse panning with out-of-focus shooting. In this case, although the Giulia gives you the feeling of speed, the background is also blurred and out of focus, which negates the panning effect, also if sometimes the result might make some sense in terms of pure visual experience.

Strictly speaking, panning is about keeping the car in focus while the background ‘moves’. However, it is also possible to do a ‘reverse panning’, where the background is in focus and the car cuts through the frame like a bolt. Here are some examples of a properly executed ‘reverse panning’ where the car is out of focus and the background is not.

In the first image, the car takes up most of the available space in the frame, but there is still enough in-focus background to convey a sense of speed.

The effect of speed is enhanced by allowing the composition to ‘breathe’ by including more background.

Preserving the meaning of the image is also important. In this case everything was done properly but the composition. The result is a meaningless out-of-focus red stripe on an in-focus background.

All images were taken with a Fuji X-T4 and a Zeiss Touit 32/1.8, as I opted for portability rather than the (proportionally) cumbersome XF 50-140/2.8 or the beastly XF 150-600 5.6/8.

Of course, this choice had its drawbacks, as it did not allow me to take pictures of the most remote parts of the track. However, with no pressure to deliver a work to a client, I had the opportunity to make some experiments.

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