May Bank Holiday weekend saw the arrival of the British Superbikes at Oulton Park in Cheshire. As a sports photographer, motorsport was a gap in my portfolio so I made plans to attend. Some quick research gave me all I needed to know regarding times and places, etc and I chose to attend the practice sessions on the Saturday as this would afford me the best opportunities to photograph the action. A couple of hours on YouTube and I felt as though I knew the place and I also picked up some useful techniques to use.

I firstly planned to capture shots using a ‘panning’ technique which attepts to keep the bike sharp but the background blurred as you follow the subject in front of you – I headed to Druid’s Corner and tried my hand. You really need to get down to a shutter speed of around 1/250 second to get the effect but the slower you go the more blurred images you capture with an occasional sharp one!
I walked clockwise around the circuit stopping where I thought I could add more images along the way.

My second objective was to photograph the bikes through a chicane as they lean over almost horizontally. I had been told to head towards Knickerbrook / Hislops for the chance to do this and I duly did. Once there, I needed to find the best spot to see them coming through the bends then work out the speeds required, etc. After a while of standing & shooting, I sat / knelt down for a different angle then I led down to try to add a bit more drama.

Finally I wanted to add some shots with more than a single bike in and watched and waited until the chance came along. As it was not a race day there was probably less jostling for position than there would be in the pressure of a race but I did manage a few decent shots.

Numbers wise, I took 4550 images, deleted 700+ where I failed to get the whole bike in the shots. I then deleted over 1500 where the image wasn’t as sharp as I would have liked (mainly because of learning to pan at low speeds). I’m still left with far too many good shots to go through, I will see if I can do something a bit more creative with one of them.
More images can be seen here…