Win A Supercar Drive By Sharing Your Pictures

We think our Facebook page is a sleeping giant. We know that we’re guilty of not giving it the love it deserves, but we need your help to do that. So Marc has decided to give all the drivers we’ve photographed on track an incentive to visit our Facebook page here. Judging by the smiles on your faces, you’d probably like to do it all over again, so here’s a chance to do that for free.

Simply upload any picture you have that WE shot of you (note the important part!), ‘like’ our Facebook page and you’ll automatically be entered into a draw to win a Single Supercar Blast with 6th Gear Experience. That’s it, simple. The winner will be announced on our Facebook page on the 1st of May 2013. So start uploading and liking, you could be driving a supercar again for free this year.

Why We Paparazzi The Pitlane

One of the most popular pictures we create for supercar driving event days is the in car shot. It’s particularly popular with guest’s relatives and friends as it shows the driver unmistakably sitting in the supercar about to head out on track. The only thing is, how we get the shot sometimes raises a few eyebrows.

In order to get all of the important aspects into the shot, we have to use a very expensive and rather odd lens. For the photography fans out there, it’s a Nikkor 10.5mm Fisheye lens. It’s not cheap, but it’s a lens that gives us a picture of the driver, hands on the wheel, plus you can see pretty much the whole of the car interior, including that all important steering wheel badge, proving without doubt that they were needed driving a Lamborghini.

Driving event photography and pitlane photography
Pitlane photos are loved by supercar drivers

The big problems with a lens like this and getting the shot successfully are threefold. First off, it has a field of view of almost 180 degrees. This means that in order for the picture to look right, our photographer has to reach into the car to the point that, to the driver, it feels like he’s trying to take a photograph of the inside of their nose! It feels odd to people to have a camera this close to them, but when they see the shot later, everyone loves it. Secondly, there’s a dark car interior plus blue sky hopefully shining into the car. So we need a flash gun. But only a little bit. Too much flash and not only will the driver look a pale bleached white, they’ll probably be blinded and not able to drive. So our photographers are constantly juggling daylight and flash light to get the shot consistently dead-on each time. Finally, we don’t have very long. Just seconds in fact. We’re at the end of the pitlane, the instructor isn’t wanting the driver to be too distracted and of course, the driver is just wanting to get out onto the track.

So if you’re driving a supercar on track this summer and you see one of our pitlane photographers, don’t worry. He’s not trying to photograph your nose hairs. Trust him, enjoy your drive and then take a look at the result in our photo truck. You’ll like it.

How To Serve 600 Customers With 7,000 Images. All In One Day.

With the chance of a quiet moment in the busy supercar event photography season, we chat to the head of MI Images, Marc Bevan about some of the important things that happen behind the scenes of a successful supercar photography operation and how he keeps his team of hard working photographers and event staff on target and how he manages the high workload of his Nikon camera equipment.

Q. From a car photography point of view, your business has unique requirements. Unlike advertising or editorial, what would you say the main needs of your photography customers are?

As our car photography is predominately based around capturing people driving cars, the main objective is to capture a clear images of the person drive behind the wheel. We also need to capture a nice shot of the car, but the client demands clear shots of the driver over anything else.

The hero shot every driver wants. Driving a Ferrari 458 Italia, Prodrive testing ground

Q. Your cameras must get a hard life. What equipment, cameras and lenses do you shoot with and what sort of durability do you need?

As our work is all out doors, the British weather cant take it’s toll on my photographers and the kit they use. Supercar driving events don’t stop because of some rain, so we have to be able to operate whenever our supercar clients are on track. We have a stock of 10 Nikon camera bodies, ranging from older D2 series cameras up to D3 series, all weatherproofed. All of the equipment is owned and maintained by MI Images as we like to keep in touch with the number of shots each camera is up to.

Q. Why Nikon?

No other reason than once you start on a path and build up a stock of lenses, changing brands can become expensive just for the sake of a few months technical advantage, before your chosen brand brings out their latest camera enhancements. We match the gear to the job and we don’t need massive megapixel resolution. Our work requires to shoot jpeg and to print at no larger than 12×8.

As well as the 10 Nikon bodies we use the Nikon WT2 , WT4 WiFi transmitters to allow us to transmit the shots from photographer back to the sales truck. We use several prime telephoto lenses including several Nikkor 300mm 2.8’s. They are expensive, but we need multiple lenses as we are required to cover multiple events at the same time.

All of the photographs are then sent back to a specially constructed HGV truck. Inside this truck are 10 client viewing screens. The truck is fitted with its own print lab and sales station allowing customers to pick images and send them for print, then pay and collect their order just minutes later. Using this system, we have been able to serve over 600 drivers, plus their friends and families over a single day on track.

Bespoke designed HGV unit is the headquarters of MI Images on 6th Gear Events

Q. How many frames will your cameras shoot on a busy day?

We regularly shoot 7,000 photographs a day at most events. In 2012 our camera fleet shot just short of 1 million photographs.

Q. What sort of workflow do you use? Most car photographers shoot RAW at maximum resolution and process the files later, but don’t do that. Why is that?

Our workflow is based around what I have dubbed the “10 minute rule”! We have 10 minutes from shooting the image of the car and driver on track to having it ready for the client to view, any more and the sale will be lost! As the majority of our clients are people that have driven their dream car they want to see pictures of themselves once they’ve finished their driving experience. Our aim is to have their photos ready for viewing as they leave the car!

This is the reason that all our work is shot in jpeg, to speed up image transfer from the camera to the viewing station. We have no post production, our photographers need to shoot the image as the picture will to be viewed by the buyer, like it used to be back in the days of film! Our image management software has been developed by us for this very task and has been enhanced in-house to allow guests to find their own images very quickly amongst the vast amount we shoot.

Q. Do you only offer print sales?

No. We also allow our clients to purchase the jpeg files to use however they wish, with the type of photography we are doing you have two choices, offer the client the files on the day for an extra fee – takes seconds longer than producing just a print. The digital images are supplied instantly on CD. The event organisers love it, because we actively encourage sharing digital images on social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook. 90% of our clients take the option to buy the digital version of the images as well as the print.

Q. It seems like even though quality is important, you’re not precious about the images once the event is over. What happens to all of the pictures you take?

Our photographs have an instant appeal and people want them right then, but after the event the moment is gone and the excitement and adrenaline has gone, so the impulse purchase moment has passed. We receive emails from customers asking for images after the event, so for 2013 that’s something we’re introducing. Previously, we’ve taken the view that uploading more than 7,000 images per day from a busy event just doesn’t make sense, but with customers asking for the service, we’ll be adding it. The key thing will be making such a huge amount of images easily searchable by clients, but we think we’ve found a solution.

Q. You wouldn’t think image theft was a problem for you, but you still have hassles sometimes?

With our workflow and not using web galleries to share and display our work, we have minimised the risk of commercial images theft and copyright infringement. However with the modern mobile photo (camera phone) we have seen a massive increase in image theft from our client viewing screens. Modern society is unaware in the most part that grabbing a photograph from our viewing screens using your camera phone is still theft!

Q. What would be the ideal technology advancement for you that would make your job easier and how do you see the event photography industry moving over the next few years?

Event photography and the industry can already move forward with today’s technology, you just need to be more open minded to the possibilities. I’m a photographer first and foremost but I very rarely get to shoot anymore! What we’re trying to do with MI Images is bring a professional element into the workflow of event photography. We see the main advances will be more based around image tagging, sorting and retrieval of images quickly, rather than in camera technology.

For 2012 we have pioneered a system that automatically sorts each and every photograph we shoot on track into that client’s folder. We developed this system in house and it isn’t available off the shelf. Being able to tell that which cars any the driver on any particular day were driving and at a particular time has even further streamlined our workflow providing a better client experience.

I see the single photographer and small operators starting to struggle unless they keep investing in the latest technology. We have spend approximately £100,000 on our systems, cameras, printer etc. Weekend warriors just don’t have the same impact and miss the fact that the photograph and its quality are just one very small part of the jig saw puzzle. The workflow and delivering the customer a quality image quickly is the most important part of the sales process.

Q. Plans for 2013?

As well as the online print ordering service, we’re being asked by equestrian event organisers to discuss adapting our ‘supercar photography’ business model into the larger equestrian events. We think that if scaled correctly it can work very well and it’s something we’re quite excited about.

Our View From The Office

One of our largest driving experience clients is 6th Gear Experience, one of the UK’s leading providers of driving experience events. With a fleet of over twenty supercars, venues across the UK and drivers often driving several cars on the day, it’s a logistical challenge for any event photography business.

We thought we’d take this opportunity with our new blog to give you a quick behind the scenes look at the size of our photography operation. The bespoke truck you see here was custom engineered to a joint specification devised between us and features a complete bank of screens to allow customers to browse their photographs and choose images. Once the images are chosen, they’re sent to the main computer system to be queued for printing or burning onto a CD. Our custom workstation at the front of the truck monitors incoming images beamed wirelessly from our trackside and pitlane photographers and handled the print queue and CD burning.

It’s a full-on operation and it’s not uncommon for our Nikon cameras to shoot over ten thousand images, serving hundreds of prints and digital photographs to our customers before packing away and heading to the next location.

We’ll write in some future posts about the people behind the technology, our photographers and our customer facing staff and how they help customers to seamlessly view and buy images of their day.

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