I went up to Silverstone on Thursday 26th June to catch the last of three days of Formula One testing prior to the British Grand Prix in just over a week.

For £12, they open up a small section of the track for fans to go in & watch the teams thrash round Silverstone at high speed. This was my first view of real F1 – apart from seeing the Renault at the two Renault World Series days I’ve been to. The engine noise is really something to witness & boy, are they fast. You really don’t get the same sense of speed watching it on the box.

I’ll probably post a couple of entries about this shoot, if only because I took so many pictures. I think there were about 1998 shots of which I deleted  about 350 straight away due to missing the focusing or only getting part of the car in the shot etc etc.

This first batch are what I call my ‘arty F1′ stuff.

I really slowed things down with these shots, they were all taken on the 50-50mm Sigma on a monopod. All were taken at ridiculously slow shutter speeds, often right down to 1/3 sec. But I really quite like the effects which is what I set out to achieve.

On some of the shots I tried a ‘zoom burst’ technique, which is basically just zooming the lens while the shutter is open. It adds a little more movement to the image. I am quite pleased with the effect these slow shutter speeds have had. The general guidance on telephotos is to use a speed equal or faster to the focal length of the lens. So if the lens is set at 500mm, use a shutter speed of 1/500 or faster. If it’s set at 200mm then use a shutter speed of 1/250 or faster. Shooting at 30mm at 1/3sec is bound to introduce some very altered images, some of which work quite well, at least I think so, what do you think?

More of the ‘standard’ motorsport action shots to follow in part two.