Pete's Notebook

Shooting Speed

Ozzie Lyons, my dad, began capturing the magic of motor racing in the late 1930s with a Speed Graphic, a “view camera” whose design dated to 1912. Belying its branding, and notwithstanding its popularity with mid-century newsmen, that big, boxy contraption was anything but speedy.

Ozzie and his Speed Graphic, circa 1952

(photo by Geraldine Lyons — my mom)

First, it was heavy and bulky enough that just lugging the thing was a chore. Once the right shot came along, that’s all you got—one shot. As I recall the sequence, before making a second photograph you had to:

1. slide a thin metal plate into the removable, two-sided film holder on the back of the camera, and also remember to turn two little security latches, all to protect the 4-inch by 5-inch sheet of naked film from further exposure;

2. pull out the wooden film holder, flip it back-to-front, and shove it in again;

3. remove the second protective metal plate and stow it…somewhere.

Oh, and don’t forget to reach around to the front of the instrument and manually re-cock the shutter mechanism alongside the lens. While you’re at it, better check that the iris aperture, shutter-timing and focus settings—all strictly manual—are correct for the conditions of the moment.

Ok, you’re finally ready for your next shot. Say, is the race still going on?

Looking back, it reminds me of the elaborate rituals early motorists had to perform to start their cars. Some days the trip must not have seemed worth it.

Up close and personal at Andrews AFB

(photographer unknown)

Like his professional fellows of the day, Ozzie put up with all this awkwardness for the sake of image quality. At the time, the results that could be obtained in the 4×5 format were simply superior to anything smaller.

Of course that changed as technology progressed in both film emulsions and lens optics. By the late 1950s even my die-hard dad was an enthusiastic convert to 35 mm cameras. These marvelous minis were so much smaller, lighter and handier that you could easily carry two or more, and they used roll-film. That’s right, you could take as many as 36 photos as rapidly as you could twist the advance-knob on a Contax. Just think of the opportunities that opened up around the track.

When Ozzie upgraded to Nikons, wow—there was a thumb-lever to advance the film, letting you keep the camera to your eye! These beauties seemed made for racing!

To put it in automotive terms, it must have been like the advent of electric starting and synchromesh. Whether driving or taking pictures or doing anything else, such improvements change the very way you go about it—even the way you think about it.

Ozzie is the man with the mini-cam, between the guy looking down into his Rollei with flash attachment and the one still hefting a bulky Speed Graphic; Watkins Glen 1955 (photo by someone named “Sully”)

Thirty-five mm cameras were so small that an ambitious photojournalist could carry more than one. At Sebring in 1960, engineer Ozzie tried a home-made bracket mounting one camera loaded with color film, the other with monochrome. (He and I had just ridden the blimp; note how as it reared into its next takeoff, I reflexively tilted my own camera.)

Fast-forward to this century. I’m a gleeful convert to the Digital Revolution—the term is apt—and, once again, I notice my own approach to, attitude about and practice of photography have changed greatly. Especially, my enjoyment level is higher.

I used to fret about what film to load and which filter to screw on to suit the situation. Was the sky going to stay bright, or turn cloudy? Did I plan to keep shooting through sunset into nightfall? Would I be working inside a home (with reddish tungsten lighting) or a race shop (greenish fluorescents)? All that techno stuff is no worry any more; I can let my cybernetic Canon figure it out.

Another fret was the cost of the film and processing. I used to calculate I was out about 50 cents every time I pressed the shutter. It became hard to press that shutter! But doing the math made it easy to justify the price of going digital. In my case, at the time, I reckoned shot number 4411 put me ahead.

Oh, the freedom to fire at will! With my current setup, I can record better than 375 exposures on one memory card. That’s like shooting more than 10 rolls of film without reloading. And it’s all free.

The confidence you gain from being able to check what you just shot on the camera’s review screen is priceless. Did I get the whole car in the frame? Did somebody blink? Could I improve my composition? Going digital leads you to make many more photographs and, if you learn from them, your photography improves.

After the shoot, instead of sloshing around in chemical baths inside a dank darkroom, fretting about what developer, fixer and paper to use, back aching, today’s imagecrafter sits in ergonomic, air-conditioned comfort before a crisp, brilliant screen displaying his or her work in glorious color. Any aspect of the photo can be massaged until it’s just right.

Darn it, digital is just plain fun.

I do respect the accomplishments of photography’s Old Timers, back in the Analog Era. Like racing drivers then, they had to spend more of their mental capital on managing the process. Having to think about films and exposures while you’re working the race track is exactly analogous to staying mindful of not fading your brakes or damaging your dog-rings in cars without discs and electronically-managed transmissions.

Masters like Lartigue, Klementaski, Alexander and, yes, my father managed to do stunning work with equipment that looks archaic to us now—just as the Nuvolaris, Fangios, Mosses and Clarks did. To work their magic, all those people had to bring cerebral powers to bear that frankly awe me today.

In fact, given what I’ve recently learned about photography thanks to modern technology, I think I’d like to go back now and try my hand again with the old tools. Current race drivers enjoy sampling vintage machinery; I’ll bet a racing safari with dad’s old Speed Graphic would be fun.

(photographer unknown)

(Text written for a “GUEST SPEAKER” column in Classic Motorsports magazine, 2006)

Melting Speed

Let’s talk technique today. Way back when I was learning to photograph race cars, and then how to develop the film and make the prints, one night in the darkroom my dad was looking over my shoulder and commented, “You’re good at panning.”

What a thrill of pride went through me! Dad might only have been making a casual observation, but as a callow teenager I took it as invaluable validation. I was good at something!

That little ego boost came my way over 50 years ago, but ever since I’ve been especially conscious about the technique of tracking moving cars in the viewfinder.

Such action photography is enormous fun for me. It’s like a shooting sport with firearm or bow, but without the social stigma.

However, I find I have to fight falling into complacency. When shouldering cameras and setting out on a day’s hunt for trophy race cars, it’s tempting to use all of today’s technological firepower. It’s so easy to freeze the speeding vehicle in its tracks. But maybe I should be letting it melt a little.

I did know that, but what made me realize it anew happened a little while ago when, as a gift, I made a print of a friend’s vintage car in action at the Monterey Historic Races. On the spur of the moment, mostly as a learning exercise, I used Photoshop to speed-blur the background.

When my friend looked at his photo, the first thing he said was, “Oh, good, you made the car look fast. Most pictures make it look like it’s standing still.”

What a wave of guilt went through me! My friend might only have been extending a casual compliment, but I knew it was undeserved. I’d fallen into the habit of setting fast shutter speeds, simply because it pretty much guaranteed a sharp image of the car.

Then I’d faked the impression of velocity.

Not cool.

Since then, as another learning exercise, I’ve been spending a lot of my time at races with the camera set at slower shutter speeds, sometimes as low as 1/30.

You know, it’s a lot harder to get sharp pictures that way!

Here’s an example of a relatively successful attempt at 1/30 sec, showing a Viper diving into the Laguna Seca Corkscrew:

I’d rather not display my many less successful attempts.

Back in the days of film, when you had to stop and reload every 36 exposures—each exposure having to be paid for in film and processing expenses—it seemed important to make every shot count. Some of my race film would be going straight to a magazine, to illustrate my report, and I wanted to give them sharp pictures. So I strove for a high percentage of “keepers” by using short exposure times.

But digital photography has set us free. Pixels don’t cost a penny. Best of all, you get the luxury of reviewing your work on your laptop and selecting only the best frames to transmit to the client.

So go out and run wild, like you’re firing at will in a shoot-em-up computer game!

I did just that at the recent Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, and I learned a lot.

First, let me show what I think is a pleasing speed-blurred photo:

This image is exactly what I was looking to capture. The Porsche may be going about 50 mph around the very tight fountain turn at Long Beach, but a shutter speed of 1/125 (I know, because the digital camera records such details) makes it look faster. The speed-blurred background—real, not Photoshopped—lets the sharp front end of the car stand out.

Of course, only the nearer front corner of the car is sharp. Parts farther away from the point I was tracking, especially the rear wing, were moving enough in relation to the camera sensor to show speed-blur even at 1/125, which is an infinitesimal snap of time to our human perceptions.

I feel it’s important, in a view like this, to have the nose of the car look crisp. If your hands lag just a little, so the camera is tracking a point farther back on the car, the result looks like this:

Though this attempt at 1/60 may look successful at first glance, it isn’t what I was trying for. What’s tracked is the region of the BMW’s door number. That would be fine if I were trying to showcase the driver, or perhaps a certain sponsor decal, but I wasn’t.

To my eye, it’s unsatisfying that I failed to capture this car’s particularly distinctive face. In this tight crop of the same image, see how the grillwork is blurred:

Comparing the relatively stationary lower wheel spokes with the blurry upper ones proves I wasn’t swinging the camera fast enough to keep up with the front end of the car as it arced past me.

I fired at this same BMW with the same camera settings on half a dozen other passes, but none of them were any “better” than this. It wasn’t until later, reviewing the day’s take onscreen, that I realized how often I’d missed.

My takeaway lesson: Facing this particular panning challenge, keep your eye on the front of the target. And shoot a lot.

Other panning situations exist, of course. When a car is coming straight at you, you really aren’t panning, but still you have choices in your shutter speeds. If you set a very fast exposure time, it keeps the whole car sharp, rather than letting everything around the center speed-blur radially. During my Long Beach safari, this shot of two Corvettes was made at 1/1000 of a second:

It’s an adequately sharp, publishable photo, but these cars might be parked. My fast shutter speed robs the image of a sense of speed. I can only hope the tight crop, the tilted frame and the bright colors make up for that.

But what about the much older, b&w picture posted at the top? It’s one of my personal favorites, because it represents an experiment that worked. I took that shot after sundown at the Daytona 24 Hour in 1971, across from the pits at about the S/F line. The car, of course, is the magnificent Penske Ferrari 512M driven by Donohue/Hobbs.

The situation was similar to that with the Corvettes above in that the Ferrari was coming more or less at the camera, although its velocity was vastly higher. This 600-hp race car would have been going something near 200 mph, and even 1/1000 of a second would have yielded a decent amount of motion-blur.

But the very low light required a pretty long exposure (sorry, that was way before digital and I kept no records of my settings). This risked speed-blurring the whole car out of recognition. Obviously a hopeless situation that you would normally avoid when trying to give your client publishable images.

But I’d already made a lot of conventional pictures that day, and I remember banging off a dozen of these gambles just to see what would happen.

As I found in the darkroom later, not much good happened. Every one of those other photos was a waste of film. But in this one case the experiment worked.

What makes it work, I think, is that something specific to the car, its nose number, remains recognizable amidst all the speed-zoomed violence.

That was pure blind panning luck. I was simply playing. But, for once, play paid off.

Long live play.

(Below, the Porsche 917K of Elford/Larrousse winning Sebring in 1971)

Contents and concept copyright © 2009 by Pete Lyons