Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports… all the others are games.— Ernest Hemingway
It’s #wheelswednesdau and today I’m reminiscing about the only time, I was able to make some photographs in that most hallowed of racing venues: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway—aka the Brickyard. The Indy 500 race is synonymous with motorsport and while I have yet to see a 500 race in person, I was able to photograph the penultimate US Grand Prix at Indianapolis as a guest of Ferrari.
How I made my favorite image from that race: The photograph (above) of Michael Schumacher was made during practice (or qualifying, I don’t remember which) for the 2003 US Grand Prix. The image was captured using an Olympus E-1, which used the legendary Kodak KAF-5101C Four Thirds System CCD sensor, which is beloved by many contemporary photographers because of its ability to produce a filmic look
The lens used was an Olympus 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 Zuiko Digital zoom lens (at 62mm, 124mm equivalent.) The E-1’s sensor has a 2X factor so the lens produced the equivalent angle-of-view of a 110-400mm lens. The Shutter Priority mode exposure was 1/000 sec at f5.6 and ISO 200. I made several images while standing on the roof of the one of the garages at Indy, which requires a special pass, that I was lucky enough to get since, at the time, Olympus was a sponsor of the Ferrari F1 team.
When I returned home from the race that Schumacher won in the rain I found that I never captured a good of image of him actually winning the race. So I decided to create an impression of that win—ala LeRoy Neiman—in the digital darkroom.
I first used Photoshop’s Watercolor (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor) to give it an artistic look. Next, I applied the Poster Edges (Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges) filter to punch up the image. Then I applied the Motion Blur command ((Filter > Blur > Motion Blur) but instead of using the kind of blur that follows the direction of the car, I made it more vertical with a forward slant to provide a more impressionistic touch. The Eraser tool was then used to lighten the areas around Schumacher’s helmet and the Ferrari logo to complete the image’s overall look.
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Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography with new copies are available from Amazon for crazy prices (for some crazy reason) but used copies start around four bucks.