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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.

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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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