The forest stage

The Goodwood Festival of Speed is coming up again this weekend and while I sadly won't be going this year, I'll be following online here and there. The GRRC Twitter account shared this nice little video today about the year Richard Burns and Colin McRae both went head-to-head up the hill and on the rally stage—two British World Rally champions, both sadly no longer with us.

Publishing a photograph of some trees may seem an odd accompaniment to talk of rally cars, but this photograph was taken up on the Festival of Speed rally stage. I've written before about how much I love this part of FoS: the closeness to the action, the atmosphere in amongst the trees, the fun of watching cars chucked round corners sideways and of course, the jump.

At last year's FoS, I spent the afternoon of my first day up on the rally stage and stuck around until all the cars had finished and most of the crowd had headed for the exits. The light in the forest was beautiful and with some dust still hanging in the air from the cars there was a decent bit of atmosphere. As I walked to the top of the hill, I carried my X-Pro2 with the fantastic Voigtlander 50mm f/1.5 lens I'd recently bought and played with shooting wide open through the trees as I went.

The depth of field on this shot is honestly a bit too shallow and/or I probably focused on the wrong tree. Rather than the closest tree on the right, with a do-over I'd focus on the next closest tree, just left-of-centre which draws the eye more. 

Initially, this led me to discard the image as one to publish but over time as I came back to my FoS photographs for various other posts, I still just felt a connection to the image and so it's been sitting in my 'to publish' collection in Lightroom for quite a while now. The video of Burns and McRae was a nice reminder and as good an excuse as any to publish.

And while we're here, here's another similar image from my walk out of the forest stage that evening: