12,000+ pics shot over the weekend and these are my favourites. If you’re interested in the mechanics of photographing F1, go to the end of the blog for the full story.
For those into photography, here’s how it works in the F1 world, for me at least.
I take out 2 cameras (Canon 1DX Mk2) with a lens on each. It will vary but typically it will be a 500mm and a 70-200mm. In a back back will be 2 or 3 extra smaller lenses, this allows me to cover most shots.
Each camera has two memory cards and I write jpeg files to both of the cards. I could shoot in RAW but the files are much larger which gobbles up hard drive space and they are too slow to download.
I keep a large 128gb CF card in slot one of the camera and that will stay in the camera the whole weekend. It would be highly unlikely that I would fill that card. In slot 2, I use a high speed card that I download after each session at 10 times the speed of the CF card. That card is wiped once all pics are on the laptop and is ready for use again during the next session.
I will send a number of good images direct from the camera to my kymillman.com website plus copy them to my clients e.g. theformulaoneblog and the formulaonegirl blog along with Suttons Motorsport Images.
After each session, normally around lunch time and at day’s end, I will bring the cards back and ingest them into my laptop using Photo Mechanic 5. This program allows me to quickly view each image and pick the better ones. To do this in Lightroom would be many times slower and speed is of the essence in this caper.
The better ones are then transferred to Lightroom, imported with some basic processing settings and data that is imbedded in the file by Photo Mechanic. That info contains the date, event, what day it is of the event, copyright owner etc. Then I crop and adjust each pic as required and save them as jpeg files ready to drag into a program called Filezilla.
One click of a button sets the batch of files heading to various FTP servers. At Suttons in the UK, Chris sits at a computer ready to select the better ones, caption them with further information he will glean from looking at the image e.g. which driver/team, corner etc. and publish them for the world’s media to sift through.
At the end of the day I copy all images across to a spare hard drive and head out and have a late night meal some other photographers who work these hours. I am thankful to a number of F1 photographers who’ve been most supportive, in particular Mark Thompson, Clive Mason, Mark Sutton, Manuel Goria and Steven Tee. Oh, and one should not forget fellow Alan Partridge fan Will Taylor-Medhurst who’s back of his head featured in Saturday’s blog.
Thanks for reading and feel free to share this with your F1 fan friends.
