Well that certainly felt like the longest winter I’ve had in a while. I’ll be frank and say that I’m not even sure if I know what direction to point the camera in at this stage. We’ve been to a few cars and coffees here and there just to try and keep active but not it’s time to get back to doing a bit more Motorsport with the 2026 season fast approaching. And what better way to start, or well a way back into motorsport for this year than to head along to some test days, in order to do a little preseason testing ourselves. After all, why should the drivers be the only ones to get all the fun.
While seemingly sat in the eternal darkness of winter, doing all the things you tell yourself not to do continually year on year, you still find yourself for instance scrolling through instagram for far too long, checking up on people’s websites that you lookup to to see if there’s any hidden gems that you haven’t seen before. Trying to grasp any form of inspiration you can do in order to help hone the direction in which you want to take the following year.what sort of shots you want to focus on, how you want to change your storytelling for the upcoming year, what circuits you think you might be going to. Or what absolute stunning images you want to plan out. Not that any of the above can be a bad thing, it’s good to be thinking about where and what you want to be doing and how you might want to change things up. But you can find yourself slowly digging a hole of comparison rather than inspiration. But moving on to actually getting back out there, shaking off that winter dust from your sensor.
Personally, I’m not sure how many people approach their first part of these sessions when coming back. This time round, I opted to ease my way back into things. I hung out in the pits while catching up with some friends, other photographers and drivers. I grabbed a handful of shots here and there while waiting for the caffeine to do its thing. And once a few red flags had been by and we had run up and down the pit lane looking for a few shots that seemed like a good idea. I thought it was time to head out trackside.
Starting with any spot that I was rather comfortable with. Getting some head-on images but this time trying to frame them slightly differently to how I have before. With that in mind, it was also a spot to start practising some panning again. Inherently I for some reason have always struggled with panning to some degree. Sure I can nail a good 1/30th every now and again but my weak little arms still need some practice in holding my 70-200mm THAT steady. So we started at 1/100th, and after feeling comfortable and nailing a fair few pans at that speed in a row, I dropped it down to 1/80th, then 1/60th and so on. While doing this I also worked around to a few different spots between the numerous red flags. I first started doing this activity of working down with my pans as a warm up exercise somewhere in the past year and found it actually worked rather well…warm up, and by the point of race day over the weekend, it’s easier to shoot consistently at lower speeds.
One of the reasons I was so keen to get out and shoot was the fact that this is one of the few occasions where we actually start to push into the golden hour in UK Motorsport. With the clocks changing in the coming weeks there tends to only be one or two events that fall close to sunset, and the same can be said for the other end of the calendar.
Overall I found my day as one big multi pronged approach to getting back into the swing of things. Almost like going to the gym, having a routine of shots and techniques I was wanting to practice. And my little routine to practice panning is similar to doing reps of weights. It was certainly a worthwhile task and I’m looking forward to booking in a couple more days like this before the season commences.
