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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.