With two Grand Prix and a World Endurance event on the cards, I was wanting to understand more, to understand why and how my images were looking like they did and how do I make them better.
So I went on an educational course.
My experiences at Silverstone earlier in the year had given me the bug big time, and I was becoming very eager to get out and shoot more images, refine my skills and build more understanding to why and how I was taking these images.
I’ve never been taught much about photography, but I have had friends in the past who were trained to different levels and who shot many different subjects – food, freesports sport, clothing – but none that I can remember, used to shoot motorsport.
I remember sitting a pub once, enjoying an ale and shooting the breeze with a friend, talking about snowboard photography, something I used to practice a great deal. When chatting about technicalities and methods, he mentioned that photography is very much about experimentation, taking different images, from different locations, with different settings, until you get a result that your happy with.
I thought at the time, that it was a well rounded viewpoint and very observant.
It would be easy to stand in one spot and take the same image over and over again. I think the variety and attempting to capture that variety, is the challenge on offer, and one that is not easily mastered – that’s the lure of photography for me; the possibilities are endless.
…photography is very much about experimentation, taking different images, from different locations, with different settings…
So anyway, back to the course.
I’m the kind of person who loves to be taught how to do something on the job; practice makes perfect. I’m not a reader of books, nor am I going to learn by watching somebody else; I very much enjoy being critiqued and given specific challenges that I have to then try and achieve. I find that very informative and that helps me learn and remember.
So I decide to go on this photo course, to the Goodwood Revival no less.
I learnt few things, but one thing that I did learn (or affirmed to myself) is that you not going to get creative standing in the same place. That was quite apparent very quickly in the morning.
While I enjoyed the motorsport we were shooting, and sure I picked up a few opinions and pointers, I didn’t really find the learning experience that fulfilling, in fact, it got a little frustrating.
All these wonderful subjects lapping this wide open circuit, and I’m taking the same image, just of different cars.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s great practice for specific skills and techniques, but I wanted the challenge of a new location, a new subject and to get help with more aspects than simply shooting at five frames a second, not that I could even do that as my camera would only shoot at about two.
Then during that balmy afternoon on a glorious late summer day, the Can-Am machines came out en-masse for their warm up/qualifying laps.
Thunderous noise and pace that hadn’t been seen earlier in the day as these low slung antiques danced around the Goodwood Circuit at hyper speed. Fantastic.
I’m going again next year, but next time, I’m doing my own thing, that’s already decided.
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