I talk a lot about technique here on the blog. It’s only a very small part of photography as a whole but it’s not until actually using the camera becomes second nature that you can start really thinking about all the other stuff.

Seeing a different angle or composition, for example, is far harder to do when you’re still trying to figure out what your shutter speed needs to be.

This weeks’ photo was taken when I was standing on Brooklands corner at Silverstone. I just happened to look behind me to see a car rounding Woodcote, just visible above the barriers. I found something to stand on to get myself a little higher and saw there was a shot to be had.

The settings are pretty standard for this type of shot (1/160th at f/8 in Shutter Priority mode) but I had them already dialed in so I didn’t have to think about them. All I had to do was pre-focus on where I knew the cars would be and flick my 70-200mm into manual focus. Because of  the number of barriers, signs and fence posts along my panning path, my auto focus would have had very little time to lock on to the car one it came out into the open.

The real takeaway here is that because I wasn’t chimping the back of my camera, or fiddling with dials and buttons, I was free to look around me and spot this different image opportunity. So spend  some quality time with your camera – get to know it even better.