Photography
Goodwood Festival of Speed rally stage on 6x7 film
Photograph a flying rally car with a 6x7 medium format film camera? Go on then.
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Photograph a flying rally car with a 6x7 medium format film camera? Go on then.
“I lugged a frankly unhealthy amount of camera gear with me for the 2017 FoS (Festival of Speed), leading to very sore, swollen shoulders for a few days afterwards where my backpack straps had put so much pressure..”
On my 2017 visit to the Goodwood Festival of Speed I may have taken so much camera equipment with me that I was in pain for days, but it did allow me to take a few photographs with the beastly Bronica GS-1 6x7 medium format camera.
I shared a couple of those images from the main paddocks in the article linked above, but took more photos up on the rally stage.
Tracking fast-moving objects with a waist-level finder, where left and right are reversed, isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever tried but to my own surprise worked out. I attempted two frames capturing the cars as they got some air off the small jump round the back of the stage and both worked out OK.
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This first shot of a Datsun 240Z astoundingly came out sharp, with the car nicely frozen mid-air and the scenery in a blur as I tracked. The next frame, of a rally-spec Porsche 911, wasn’t quite as successful at freezing the car but still isn’t bad! Especially given my total inexperience shooting with film.
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Other than these two actions shots, I made a handful of other images with the Bronica on the rally stage that day.
I took one frame of the hump in the back straight that acted as a jump ramp for any car giving it enough beans: a little over-exposed.
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There’s a corner just before this back straight, where the festival cameraman is set up to get them sliding round and gunning it for the jump. I took one frame of the cameraman waiting for the next car, and one of a car rear-down as it accelerates hard up the incline.
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From roughly the same spot, but looking right, you can catch the previous corner as the cars go fully sideways before accelerating through the next corner onto the straight. Here I got frames of a Subaru Impreza and a Mitsubishi Starion.
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Finally, I shot three frames among the denser, darker areas of the woods. I’m impressed with how well the Portra 400 film held up for these shots.
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I’ve again left the frame borders from scanning these images, both because I quite like the effect—cliché as it might be, it adds an extra physicality to the images—and because I see these as snapshots from the event.
It’s a good few years since I’ve made it down to FoS now, and will probably be a good few more before I make it again—young kids and now living the other end of the country don’t make it an easy trip—but I would take a film camera with me again. I’d just try to make sure I could either leave it somewhere safe while not using it to save weight, or use it on one day of a long weekend.