The Greymouth Motorbike Street Races is an annual event, run every Sunday of Labour Weekend (a public holiday weekend here in New Zealand), and is one of the few street race events still held anywhere in the world. As such, it draws a big crowd, and competitors from all over New Zealand.
It also happens to be a fantastic event to photograph. With motorbikes hurtling past you at up to 165kms an hour, often literally only at arms length, it will test the reflexes and autofocus speed of the most advanced camera systems.
I haven't photographed the event for several years - partly due to other commitments, and partly due to bad weather in previous years. I decided to go this year and try my luck with my S5, and my newly acquired Panasonic L 70-300mm f4.5-5.6. I haven't really shot with the 70-300mm since acquiring it a few month ago - and the Street Races would be the prefect test for it.
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| Greymouth Street Races 2026. Lumix S5 with L 70-300mm. f6.3 @ 1/2500th, ISO 400. 170mm |
Whenever I'm shooting anything that is travelling so fast that if you blink you literally miss it, I don't use the cameras autofocusing system. Instead I go 'old school' and zone focus. I pick a point (usually the bend in the road) where I want to capture the action, and then I manual focus on that point. I set the camera on continuous shooting (the S5 captures 7fps in manual mode - which is plenty fast enough) and then fire off a burst of images when the bikes enter the zone of focus. Of the burst of 4 or five images, usually at least 2 or 3 of them are in sharp focus. At least that's the plan.
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| No.69 Daniel Bradley - 2016 Kawasaki ZX6R. f.8 @ 1/2000th, ISO 800. 300mm |
Not a bad plan as it turns out. The S5 has two handy features to help when setting this sort of shot up. First, when you manual focus you can enable a magnification of the focus area to achieve critical focus - and second, whatever is in focus has 'focus peaking' (if you enable it) so that you can visually see what is in focus. Even travelling as quickly as they were, I could see the bikes glow red (I have my peaking set to red but you can choose other colours) when they came into the zone of focus. How cool is that!
An odd thing happened throughout the day while using this technique however. After a while, the manual focus would go 'out of focus' and I would have to refocus again. I actually found myself flicking the AF/MF switch on the lens and doing a quick autofocus and then flicking back to manual before the riders came around the course again. I can't for the life of me figure out why the manual focus would go out of focus when I wasn't anywhere near the focus ring? It's a mystery...
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| 660 - Gary Graham, 2021 Aprillia RSV4. f8 @1/3200th, ISO 800. 300mm |
With the occasional manual focus issue, I wasn't feeling as confident as I would like with the S5 and 70-300mm combination. This also wasn't helped by the fact that I photograph wearing my 'long distance' glasses so everything is nice and sharp through the viewfinder. But when I go to look at the back of the camera, it's all a bit of a blur! Consequently, shots don't look all that sharp to me in review. In fact they look down-right out of focus! This does not, I'm sure you'll agree, foster massive confidence in your images.
I choose, however, to trust the process - and the gear - that what looked in focus in the viewfinder (and glowed red) would indeed be in focus. And then I just had to let the quality of the lens do the rest. At the end of a very long days shooting (about 7 hours and 2500 images later), I can't say that I was all that confident that I had a card full of 'keepers'? And would the new lens perform?
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| 778 Riley Foster & 399 James Carley - Supermoto. f7.1 @ 1/1600th, ISO 1000. 300mm |
Okay, it performs.... (as you can see from the images in this post). In fact it performs astoundingly well! I was delighted when I had finished loading the images on to the computer and opened them in Adobe Bridge. The first few were slightly out of focus (heart dropped), and then 'bang' - tack sharp! And that was the tale of the next few hours editing the 2500+ photos. A sequence would start out slightly out of focus, and then bang, bang, bang - three tack-sharp images as the bikes moved through the zone.
I made sure not to shoot wide open (f5.6) at the full 300mm (never a lenses sharpest combination) to guarantee as much sharpness as I could eek out of the lens. And it didn't dissapoint.
Background separation at f8 and 300mm is still reasonable - and I tried to help myself by choosing as clean a background as I could when setting up in a position on the track.
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| 31 - Ian Reed - 2016 BMW S1000RR. f7.1 @ 1/3200th, ISO 800. 200mm |
Am I happy with the results? You betcha. Happier than a pig in mud! I've been shooting the Street Races for probably the last 20 or so years (on and off), and these results are probably the best (in terms of sharpness, colour, clarity) I've ever achieved.
Some will say that the Panasonic Lumix S5 isn't a sports camera. And to be fair, it probably isn't. Some will say that the 'cheap' L 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 isn't a motorsport lens. And again, maybe not. But does that mean you can't get amazing sports/action images with this combination? The proof, as they also say, is in the pudding.
How's my pudding? Delicious! 😋
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| TPP Corner, Greymouth Street Races 2026. f8 @ 1/3200th, ISO 1000. 77mm |
