March, 2012 NASCAR Nationwide Series Race from Phoenix International Raceway

During the March 2012 NASCAR visit to Phoenix, I was on this “trying something different” theme, and if you remember the images I posted from the Nationwide practice session here: NASCAR Nationwide Series – Trying something completely different you will see a bit of a continuation of that “something different” theme. In the past I would get tons of shots of cars-on-track and for the most part I would spend my time outside the track shooting cars with long glass. These images from the race aren’t different from anything you’ve seen before, but somewhat different for me, in that the style is a bit different from what I normally shoot and my shooting position is different. I tried to look for a different perspective with this race, but in many cases during the heat of the moment and all the excitement of the race I tended to slip back into my old habits of getting “traditional” style images.

I realized I use the word “different” about a thousand times in that first paragraph so maybe I should just stop typing and show you the images.

During the race I tried some slow shutter speed panning like this shot of Elliot Sadler and Kyle Busch but I can’t say I was really excited with the results so I didn’t spend a whole lot of time shooting panning shots.

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2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series – Kobalt Tools 500 from Phoenix International Raceway – part 2

When we last left our hero’s they were hurtling at break-neck speeds towards their doom . . .   Oh wait, that’s not right. Both Tony and Carl were fighting tooth and nail for every inch of track position they could get. That sounds more like where we left our story.

At this point it was anybody’s guess who would win, Tony is a proven champion, but Carl has won here in Phoenix in both his Nationwide car and in his Sprint Cup car, and all on the same weekend.

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NASCAR Sprint Cup tests the new surface at Phoenix International Raceway

Phoenix International Raceway had a massive re-paving project where the entire surface was replaced, as well as some other changes to increase safety and make the fans experience much better.

I expected the NASCAR Sprint Cup cars to be primer grey and with very few markings so I anticipated mostly working the garage for good shots of the drivers, well that wasn’t exactly how everything turned out.

I saw some photos from the construction phase and was interested in how covering the upcoming race in November would be effected.

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NASCAR 2010, a look back at some of my favorite images

Some of the other photographer’s blogs that I follow post favorite images of the year or favorite sports images, so I thought I would go through some of my NASCAR images and pull out a few favorites. I don’t have a lot of experience shooting NASCAR, and I’ve only been able to shoot NASCAR at Phoenix International Raceway in Arizona, which means in some cases all my shots are going to be the same from year-to-year. After all, how many times can you walk around that same track and look for different images?

I have good days and bad days when shooting, on good days I manage to make some good images and on bad days I just get the same old shots or boring shots no matter how hard I try. I wish I could say that I always come back with the winners, but that just isn’t true. At any rate, here are some of my favorites from the year.

I’ll start this show with a little Kurt Busch sitting in his car waiting to take practice laps.

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NASCAR Sprint Cup – SUBWAY Fresh Fit 600 April 10, 2010 Phoenix International Raceway Part 3

I wanted to finish off the NASCAR Sprint Cup SUBWAY Fresh Fit 600 images before I moved on to some other images, but it turns out I just have way too many images to post them all in one story.  I’ll post another group and hope you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed shooting them.

During the opening laps of the race everything was getting a little mundane, with the cars just going around, and around. The cars were a bit bunched up and things were very exciting for us photographers because every time the group of cars came by a big cloud of dust and track debris would get sucked behind them and pelt us photographers and our gear which is a bit like being in a sandstorm/dust storm.

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