2020zoom On The Road

Motor sport photography:The inside story

Like most things in life, motor sport photography has good and bad points so let’s get the negatives out of the way first.

If you like your bed and you enjoy relaxing weekends, don’t even think about it. Virtually every Sunday in our diaries is logged out solid for months and all of these without exception will involve an early alarm call.

James is an engaging character who I get along with really well but when I pull up at his place at 6.00am to go to a shoot, he knows that a quiet journey only punctuated by me quietly cursing other road-users, is what’s required. No matter how far we travel, we never stop on the way aside from when I tell James to climb out of the car to scrape road kill off the front grill.

First port of call when we arrive is registration at the media centre to bag tabards so we can get trackside. Several cups of vile tasting coffee followed by a cooked breakfast and we might converse.

The un-written rule about filming motor sport is that when you’re in the pit-lane, you need to flaunt the chunkiest camera and the longest lens that you can. To be perverse, of course, we delight in wandering around with a strange mixture of tiny wide-angle lenses, which everyone stares at as though we've lost our minds.

Throughout the winter, we cover virtually nothing to do with motor sport. Instead we concentrate on photographing landscapes , rock bands and architecture. As a result, when we go back to filming cars in the spring, we’re total rubbish but after a few dire efforts and a couple of heated discussions, we get our act together and all is well again.

James and I work in very different ways because we have totally different backgrounds. I call him the Geek and he refers to me as Mr Art Farty.

The mechanics of my camera can be a bit of a mystery to me and this enrages James. ‘Geoff, it’s a bright, sunny afternoon. Why have you got your white balance set for flash?’ His voice is shrill, exasperated and, frankly, rather scary. I shrug and embarrassingly confess that I haven’t looked at my settings since filming a rock band in a pitch-black hall several days ago. At this point he confiscates my camera, twiddles around with various menus that I’ve never even come across, throws it back at me and then skulks away.

When he’s composed himself, I try to encourage him to do the same to a picture. ‘What are you seeing through the viewfinder right now, James?’ I ask him. Amazed by the banality of the question he’ll reply, ‘I’m seeing an Audi Quattro Sport of course, mate. What do you see?’ I fix him with a stare that would drop a terrorist at fifty paces. ‘I tell you what I see, mate. I see an Audi Quattro Sport too but I also see a large pile of dog excrement just by it’s rear wheel, a rubbish bin to the left of it and a fat bloke covered in tattoos in the background picking his nose with his one hand whilst scratching the crack of his backside with the other. I’m all for multi-tasking but is that what you’re really trying to capture with this image?’

Despite our artistic and technical differences, it generally works out fine.

Having touched upon the dodgy side of Motor sport photography, it’s now time to move onto the positives.

Fast food. Fast Women. Fast cars.

Enough said, I feel.