[Guido]

Just too add my slant as someone who has tried to make it with trackside photography.

It is a very time consuming and expensive job.

Those of you on the DSC who’ve recently gotten into photography will see how expensive it is even to buy the entry level gear.

If you consider to do it at the level I did then taking my case as an example, you have:

2x bodies at £3k each
1x 400mm f2.8 prime at £6-7k
1x 70-200mm f2.8 zoom at £1500
1x 17-35mm f2.8 zoom at £1500
2 flash units at £300 each
1x power pack at £400
2x teleconverters at £300 each
Pro monopod at £120

Insurance for all that (if you can get it for the £7k lens) is £200-400 pa.
Your public liability insurance (needed to get trackside) is £80-150 pa
If you have a retail stand trackside, then MSV want £75-100 per day off you for a trackday and considerably more for something like Double Red have at BSB rounds.

As an aside, but equally important, consider that the camera is a mechanical item with moving parts. Even the high-end pro-spec camera bodies wear out and need replacing. With several thousand shutter actuations every race meeting, they get hammered and your pic count soon stacks up. Also, you will drop them and your lenses so they steadily take crapper shots as time goes on. If you have to keep going, you have to spend on replacing your gear.

Before you can go trackside you then have to obtain the “holy grail” of trackside photography, the hallowed “Letter of Accreditation”. Without this, you aint going anywhere with your £15k of photographic goodies.

Right……… spent all that time and money, now you’re ready to leave home for a weekend’s racing.

For BSB I took Thursday afternoon and all day Friday off work 15 times per year.

Again, if you’re doing it properly, you leave your car in the morning at the circuit at 8am. You go and sign on and hand over your £10-£20 deposit for your media bib. You’ll have walked the circuit already to identify your shooting points, your track access locations, your track crossing locations, the spots where they’ll possibly stick a firkin great hoarding, burger van or ambulance on Saturday/Sunday and screw up all your planned shots etc etc (if that kind of thing crosses your mind or affects “your” shots).

Knowing you won’t see your car again until perhaps 6pm-7pm, you lug all your gear with you complete with waterproofing for “when, not if” it slings it down (getting caught short with expensive, sensitive electronic gear is a no-no). If you’re early at the circuit you might be able to claim a spot in the media centre to leave some of your gear if you trust it’s safe (insurance is void if you don’t look after your stuff).

Food/water is bulky & heavy so I rarely carried it when I went off for a day’s snapping. Simply didn’t have any room.

Logistically that’s a quick run-down of what you go through to get there…..

The main thing with motorsport photography is you rarely know who your next client is going to be. If you’re very lucky to be paid to be there by someone then you work for them and hopefully that covers some of your costs. Most trackside snappers are freelance and probably working for the love of their job, as paying clients are getting more and more scarce. Most papers pay nothing or very little. MCN pays pretty well but the odds of getting a shot in are minimal as they have their own salaried snapper for all the stock stuff.

The thing with not knowing who your next client is going to be means you have to try and get shots of every rider and every incident cos the rider or action you miss might be the only one on a Monday after the event that rings you asking if you got a shot of him/her. That means you easily have upwards of 3000 images after every meeting. Great, but what do you do with them then????.

Unless you’re lucky enough to be the only photographer there and everyone and his dog knows you, you have to market those photos as quick as you can before the impact or demand for them dwindles.

As an example Motorcycle Racer wanted decent chunks of money off me for a ¼ page ad in their mag. This would have gotten me pretty good exposure for my work as the premium racing mag on the market. I couldn’t afford it though so no marketing for me.

You then parade your shots on message forums as they get more traffic nowadays than some mags, but only if the mods allow you to.

I have a very basic website. A mate did it for me for pennies. It’s get my pics up into cyberspace where I can showcase them to any people that know they’re there. A website needs SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to get found on Google searches. I know this, but I don’t know how to do it…… There’s plenty of people out there who tell you it’s pretty easy cos they’re in the trade but that’s a bit like me saying to them as non-photographer’s it’s a piece of p1ss to get stunning bike racing photos ….They don’t have a clue how to….ditto for me with SEO.

In an ideal world I’d like a database back end on my site where people can search for a rider’s name or team or bike and the photo’s will all come up in a dedicated gallery from any year I have them from. SQL database’s cost money and know-how. Again I don’t have either.

If you don’t have databases and SEO then your only hope is to “Tag” and “Keyword” every single image so that they might show up in web search engines. I have generic tags and keyword strings that took me an age to set up, but you still have to edit them for each shot as each shot is potentially different and contains different detail.

Taking Thruxton BSB as an example, I left the media centre there after picking, editing and sending my shots to various magazines (hoping to get some published) at 9pm. It’s a 5 hour drive for me from there. I had work the next day at a 9-5 job to try and finance this “speculative” existence

Remember…….all the above so far in this post is still speculative, you don’t know if it’s going to reap any reward whatsoever…

In the end, I ran out of cash and motivation.

To consider you did all this and repeatedly got jerks saying your £10 A4 print was “expensive” and it could be gotten from any number of photographers who offered them cheaper or, we like your shots and want to use them but we don’t have any money/budget, you kind of get worn down. I got this over and over in my 5 years at BSB & WSB and eventually it took its toll to the extent where I’ve hardly used my £15k+ of gear since “stepping back” (aka quitting) from it all at the end of 2007.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it and some of the people I worked with (namely John Hackett / Ken Foley and their fantastic team) and met along the way were superb. I miss it uber-terribly, but the disillusionment I feel with the media photography world means I think what’s the point? I did it to the absolute best of my ability/financial means and made sweet FA from it.

As much as I love it, as with most walks of life, if the financial pressures surface then that always takes precedence and focus. It begins to outweigh the passion you have for your job.

I can’t speak for Paul & Linda as I don’t know their personal circumstances. They’re a duo so it’s a little easier but the pressures are still there and the financial investment needed doesn’t get halved in all areas, it gets doubled.

The fact that they’ve not uploaded shots says to me that they get nothing from it so it’s not a priority to them. It could be that they’ve suffered catastrophic hardware failure and lost all the shots but that’d probably be publicised somewhere. It could also be that they’ve had a fall-out with NE in some way so think “why upload the shots and publicise that organization for free??” It’s all speculation but they have their reasons I’m sure, just like I did.

I guess what I’ve been trying to say is, it’s not the entirely glamourous lifestyle many think it is and it’s certainly not just a case of turning up and cracking off a few shots, before stopping for tea and bickies. Selling a few shots at (a seemingly and extortionally expensive) £10 doesn’t stack up, unless you don’t need the money and have all the time in the world to dedicate to it.

I’d make every effort to turn up every single round if I could guarantee I’d get what they call in commercial sectors as “a return on investment”, but you just don’t get those kinds of guarantees in motorsport photography. Everything’s a “what-if” slap-bang up front and it stays that way. You need truck loads of time, money and motivation to do that day in day out…….sadly

Regards, Guy