Racing Pix (Mustangs 1 of 6)

F45 · June 22, 2006

Hi Folks,

I Just wanted to share a few recent racing images and ask about the business in general...

These are a couple friends who race almost every week and they asked if I could show them my style (so to speak). I've been working on architectural photography lately but I used to do sports and now I'm getting the itch to do it again (professionally). Still no website yet but its coming!

For those of you who shoot races regularly, do you shoot RAW or JPEG? I only shoot RAW but I find that I always go for the "cover shot" thus I don't take hundreds of pix during the race. The editing takes some time and I'm not able to post all the shots by the end of the day as some photogs do.

The websites that I've looked at have literally dozens of images of each racer but usually only show slight variations of the same turn or straight-away. I would rather produce my best shots and go for a reputation of providing higher-end images instead of just quick pix. These shots were shown around to the racers and they all commented on the fact that they already have tons of side shots of themselves racing but nothing showing this kind of detail in action.

My only concern is that I would have a hard time doing this for each racer (between 40 and 80 cars) and getting the images posted within a day or so as they are used to. I'm looking into having a service like Smug-mug take the orders and make the prints but haven't finalized any decisions as of yet. I edit my images for my own printing techniques which simply takes a lot of time. What are some of your thoughts on the business and the turn-around-time??

Thanks!
F45

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F45 · June 22, 2006

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F45 · June 22, 2006

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F45 · June 22, 2006

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F45 · June 22, 2006

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F45 · June 22, 2006

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Dani · July 5, 2006

nice shots! I love #4

F45 · July 6, 2006

Dani wrote:

nice shots! I love #4

Thanx Dani...

I posted these so long ago I was begininng to think no one cared

TassieD · July 6, 2006

G'day Chris,

I am not sure I can realy answe most of your questions but will give it a go. I shoot Jpeg these days for the motorsport that I cover. I have found it simpler than RAW (which I used t shoot). As I dont have a need to produce prints the day of the event I usually have time that night to sort through at my leisure. Another reason for the switch to jpeg was the time it took to load the images onto the PC and then open them up (I dont have the speediest machine going).

Hope this helps?

Great shots by the way.

F45 · July 6, 2006

TassieD wrote:

As I dont have a need to produce prints the day of the event I usually have time that night to sort through at my leisure.

Thanx David!

The advice and tips from this forum have been great and I've been putting all of them to good use lately. I prefer to shoot in the RAW

...and have streamlined my processing quite a bit in order to save time while saving image information. The larger files allow for more creative crops and bigger prints should I need them.
Covering local events (which I'm just begininng to do) and processing everything is not productive use of my time. I don't need the prints the day of the event either but it seems that many of the race photogs have been doing so, which unfortunately has spoiled the competitors and now they seem to assume that top notch shots will be available by the end of the race!
I need to tweak my approach to this business and come up with a workflow that will satisfy the client and myself (I can be very picky

)

Racing Pix (Mustangs 1 of 6)

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