tracking shots for the first time, use a big, open parking lot on a Sunday.

Tracking Shots

In the case of this session, we took the car-to-car photographs late on a Sunday afternoon heading west on Interstate 10 in Los Angeles County. This allowed the setting sun to illuminate the front and the driver's side of the truck with some pretty light without any annoying shadows.

The shots were taken from the passenger-side window of a Dodge Ram pickup owned by one of McCallister's friends. The camera vehicle was in the middle lane with the target vehicle trailing slightly behind in the slow lane.

Sometimes I will shoot out an open sunroof, first ensuring it is closed as much as possible. If the driver should have to stop short, I don't want to be ejected Goldfinger-style.

We ran just about at the speed limit, around 60 miles per hour, which is faster than I normally prefer. But with the settings selected--about 1/80th of a second at f8--the results were good, with no drivers trailing the Chevy in the picture. We were fortunate to have some trees and sound abatement walls in the background. It's always best to have something non-disruptive behind the vehicle when taking car-to-car tracking shots.

As you can see below, I achieved a good blur effect in spite of the faster shutter speed selected; a fake-looking Photoshop blur was not required. Because of the bounce of the camera vehicle, I was forced to use 1/80th of a second (higher than I wanted). If you look closely at the shot, you'll see that the depth of field is quite good, front to back. This is because I used as my focus point the driver-side front fender.

On a smooth road at slower speeds--say, 25 miles per hour for each vehicle--I could have selected a slower shutter speed, 1/45th of a second with an f-stop setting of f11 or smaller.

(I'm assuming you know how to set your camera using shutter priority, or, if you're shooting with a fully manual-capable camera like a digital SLR, that you can adjust the setting to get the combination of shutter speed and f stop that is best for the lighting conditions. See your owner's manual for specific instructions on making these adjustments.)

One helpful hint here: Compose the shots both horizontally and vertically. A magazine feature's double-page opening spread requires a horizontal image, with ample room around the vehicle for the art director to work with.

My preference is to offset the vehicle to the right. And if you want a shot at the cover, you'll need some vertical images. Don't crop too tight. Today's cameras have so much resolution you don't need to use each and every pixel as once was the case. (In the early days of digital, pre-1998, I