There are aren’t many circuits in Europe that we haven’t photographed during the last 15 years, but somehow we have managed to avoid Le Mans – until this month.

We were over in France covering an event at Folembray, and popped over to Le Mans to photograph a two day event for “Lotus On Track”.

The first day was on the Bugatti circuit, where we lined up the cars for a group shot on pit lane at lunch time. For the shot below, I used an 8mm Peleng Circular Fisheye lens on the D3x. It was the first time I had used the lens on the camera since buying the Nikon adapter for it, and found that the mirror hit the rear of the lens. Luckiy there is a screw on filter which can be removed from the back of the lens, which allowed the large mirror of the full frame body to operate freely.

The second day was on the Maison Blanche circuit with one of the fastest straights into the tightest hairpins in Europe.

When Yamaha UK wanted to showcase their latest R-Series machinery with a trackday for special guests, they chose us to record the event and provide the guests with a complimentary set of pictures of the day.

Silverstone South Circuit was the venue for the event where over 1200 pictures where taken, sorted, processed, and burnt to disc in time for all of the guests to take home with them.

Simon Belton, Marketing Manager  for Yamaha UK commented,

“I have just had a chance to look through the pictures from our event last week. They are absolutely superb! Well done and many thanks. Our guests will be delighted.”

Ducati UK booked our services for their exclusive Superbike VIP day at Silverstone. Our brief was to record the event and supply 100 guests with a disc of images to take home before the end of the event.

Working closely with the event organisers, we took a whole range of pictures that captured the atmosphere of the event and made sure that the guests left with their disc.

The pictures were continually sorted and processed throughout the day on two specially built computers, the master was burnt, and then we used a 10 disc duplicator to fire out the 100 discs within an hour, at the end of the day.

We have been covering the Land Rover Show at Billing since 1996, but this year saw a huge breakthrough in the amount of pictures that could be taken. The main difference was down to 2 specific changes to the computer system that we implemented late last year.

Taking pictures is the easy part, but providing a level of service that can quickly and efficiently deal with 22,000 high resolution files has taken many years to develop. Without going into details (and giving the game away!), we now have the capacity to deal with hundreds of gigabytes of images simultaneously which allows instant access to the images and provides the customer with a fast and accurate level of service at the point of sale.

Never before, have we allowed the photographers to take unlimited pictures at Land Rover Shows with many hundreds of vehicles driving the course, but the breakthrough in technology has allowed us to provide an even higher level of service at some of the largest events in the UK.

This allows us to capture even more of those moments that can never be repeated and give so much joy when looking back at the pictures.

The next time it takes an hour to get to work instead of 40 minutes, spare a thought for the poor old photographers who have to commute to the Artic Circle to get to work! The Artic Circle is a long way to go to take a few pictures, but when you get there, it is well worth the journey.

Set in a disused iron ore mine, the Arctic Circle Raceway has got to be one of the most spectacular motorsport venues in the world, and provides some unique motorsport pictures that can’t be found anywhere else on the planet.

The people, the scenery and the remoteness of the venue all add up to one of the most memorable trips on the calendar.

For the past 4 years, we have been the chosen photographers for the Artic Circle Race Camp and more recently for the Bikeport.no event held at the Artic Circle Raceway in Norway – the most northerly motor racing circuit in the world.

In 2009 we flew to Oslo and spent 12 hours driving up to the circuit. In the process, I got 4 speeding tickets, then lost my licence (technically it wasn’t lost, just being looked after by a nice police officer in Grong) and when I got stopped again by an officer that said “Mr Bailey, you don’t have a licence” my response of “yes I do, it is in Grong” didn’t work and a £650 on the spot fine for driving without a licence was issued. This year 3 connecting flights helped avoid the motoring offences and kept travelling down to a mere 11 hours each way.

Following over 10 years of support for the California Superbike School in the UK, when the school ran its first Spanish operated event in May, PICMAN were chosen as the official photographers.

2 days of beautiful sunshine coupled together with full access to the circuit at Calafat meant that the pictures from the first event made for a special memento of the event.

Spanish motorcycle magazine “Solomoto” attended the event and ran a comprehensive five page article on the event using pictures taken at the event.

CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE

Journalist and Content Director, Antonio Regidor, commented “Nice shots and a very good job. Congratulations!”

I have had a soft spot for the Fiat 500 Abarth since I saw it on Top Gear a couple of years ago. When Shelly (the daughter of our departed JCW) bought one, I knew I wanted to grab some shots when the time was right. Well, the sun was setting and we had been granted access to the circuit after the event at Silverstone, so I grabbed the D3x and shoved the 14-24 on it, jumped into the boot of my car, and got Chris Sherring (one of the Superbike School coaches and ex British Champion at some class of bike racing) to drive me down the start finish straight for some tracking shots. We didn’t have long, so working quickly was the key.

For the tracking shots, a shutter speed of about 1/50^th of a second was used to get the motion in the ground that was whizzing past a few inches from me whilst I was hanging head first out of the boot (if you can class 30 mph as whizzing!) 1/50^th will get the motion into the foreground of the picture, but it is still fast enough to keep the car sharp as both the vehicles are vibrating down the road. You can go slower with the shutter speed, but the percentage of useable shots decreases for only a little gain in the foreground, it is all relative to the speed of the vehicles – the choice is yours. I don’t recommend hanging out of the boot on public roads, but you can attach the camera to the camera vehicle with clamps to get the same effect, but it takes a bit longer to set up and get right.

The Static shot takes advantage of the f2 aperture of the 200mm VR to throw the background out of focus and make the car stand out in the picture. If we had moved further away from the tyre wall and control tower, we would have thrown it too far out of focus – as it is at the minute, you can still make out the reference between the car and the race circuit in the background, without it distracting from the purpose of the picture.

We were commissioned to produce the official review of the 3 day event and offer the DVD for sale to the participants. The clip uploaded is from the Team Recovery Event where two vehicles are timed to complete the course as both drivers help each other to negotiate all of the obstacles.

As part of the revamp, we are pleased to offer the a few new services to our existing line up.

Video Production.

Gary is just finishing his degree in media production and has already turned his photographic skills into moving pictures, and the video section of the website will shortly showcase some of the productions.

Wider range of online products.

The new site allows more flexibility when you add products to your cart. Custom build your CD, order prints and much more, check out the gallery pages for more info.

GoPro HD camera hire and sales.

As official GoPro resellers, we will be offering for hire our onboard HD cameras at many of our events. The GoPro HD hero was voted the best camera by The Gadget Show for picture quality and sound when compared to all the other cameras in it’s class on the market, and we will have cameras for you to record your action at selected events. The video blog will shortly have samples of the onboard footage.

GeoTagged Pictures.

In response to customer’s “Where is that taken from?”, we have invested in a Nikon GP-1 GPS attachment for the camera, that adds the location of each picture. If you have a Mac, we have been told the GPS data is automatically imported and the location shown with the picture, if you run PC, you can use Google Maps, Panaramio or Flickr to see where the photographer was stood for each shot. The device is accurate to within a couple of meters, but might not register indoors, or just outside buildings.

Portfolio.

It seems simple, but our old site focused on serving the customer with the online galleries, and never really showcased any of the huge archive of images that we have built up over the years. The new site has a section of our favourite shots for you to look through and enjoy.

Training.

www.motorsportphotographycourse.com has always been a separate venture from our main website, but this time around we combined it into the main site so that photographers can have access to all the information about our training days.

Blog.

Keep up-to-date with news and views. The blog with feature video clips and or write ups from each event, as well as general information on the service and products.

If you have any ideas that we could implement into our website or services, drop us a line and we’ll see what we can do.