16 incredible photos from Forza 5 (and how to take them)

Oh...

You should probably ignore this one.

But even disasters can be viewed in interesting ways

That crashed F40 is visible through the tinted window of another car. With the camera X-focused on the wreck, the car in the foreground has lovely blurred edges. The slightly longer shutter speed tells the story by adding motion to the other vehicles, while the crashed car is motionless. That's deep, man.

To achieve the perfect view, you'll need to use the shoulder buttons to elevate the camera to an appropriate height. Squeeze them as gently as you can and the in-environment camera will change height more gradually. But it's very sensitive.

Use high shutter speed to preserve details

Two cars racing each other are rarely traveling at the exact same speed, which makes it hard to focus on two cars at once with the standard settings. However, if you turn the shutter speed all the way down, you'll keep everything crisp, at the expense of any real feeling of motion. That can be overcome with details like tyre tracks or smoke, but in this instance it's enough just to get a high-res look at the drivers of these two cars.

The saturation is pretty high, but otherwise this is quite a naturalistic shot. Sometimes it's enough just to let the game's exquisite detail do the talking. Less is often more, and all that.

Got too much light? Turn down the exposure

This scene was just a massive explosion of light from the nearest star with some parts of a car around the edges. However, by turning the exposure all the way down (reducing the amount of light you're letting into your virtual camera), you can see through the glare and pick out the silhouette of the car, complete with god rays or 'crepuscular rays' if you want to be technical.

Detail is often compromised with low exposure shots, so feel free to fiddle with the contrast and brightness sliders to find a decent compromise. This still looks a little washed out, but the overall effect is decent enough.

Try something a bit abstract

By removing the colour, boosting the contrast and the brightness and removing the vignette completely, you can achieve a sort of pencil drawing version of your car. You could probably print it out and sell it in a frame and people would think you're the next big thing. Maybe. Especially if you position a nice large white area in the top-right so nobody can see the Forza 5 logo!

Seriously though, this is quite an eye-catching effect, highlighting the versatility of Forza 5's photographic modulation. Mode. Photo mode.

If all else fails, just hit 'reset to default'

This is the lamest tip you'll ever read on GamesRadar, I'll readily admit, but this picture was taken with by hitting 'Pause, Photo Mode, reset to default, take picture'. The default filter, the default angle... it's as vanilla as they come. But it still looks amazing.

So, as I say, you can't really go wrong. The moral being: 'if you can't ever really fail, experiment and see how well you can win'. Yeah, that sounded good. Mei Ling will probably nick that one.

What can you create?

I've shown you mine, now you show... no, actually, let's not do that. Er... let's try: 'Now I've shown you some tips and tricks, it's time for you to head out onto the next-gen raceway, hit that pause button and get snapping.' Great! Sadly, I can't find any way to export the pictures properly (hence the annoying black bar at the bottom of some of these pictures), not even through the game's official website at the time of writing. But no doubt an export feature will appear soon. In which case, stick it on Instagram or something and show us through that.

And if you're looking for more of my photographic awesomeness, check out The 33 absolute WORST photos from Gamescom 2012 and, in a similar vein just because it has pictures in it,The Pikmin suicides.