Vincent Grey Flash

A bonus entry for this evening: a quirky pano stitch of this gorgeous Vincent Grey Flash at the Goodwood Festival of Speed back in 2017.

I don’t normally publish multiple posts one after the other, but I have wanted to share this image for a long time and held back as I could never find out what the bike was (I’m a car person) until a few minutes ago.

Having just shared the leaf detail photo, I moved it to my ‘Published’ collection in Lightroom and there a few images over (taken a few months earlier) was this image again. I decided to try my Google-fu again and finally I found an Autosport live coverage report from the event listing a tribute to the great John Surtees and including a Vincent Grey Flash. Another search later confirmed that this is indeed that bike.

The bike itself is lovely, and the light is good, but what I’ve always enjoyed most about this image—and thus never ‘corrected’—is the off-angle, overlapping composite stitch. 

The effect was born of my location, standing at the edge of the paddock where at Goodwood you really are just feet away from the machines and drivers/riders. I had the Voigtländer Nokton 50/1.5 on my X-Pro2 (a roughly 75mm full frame-equivalent focal length) and the vintage bikes were immediately in front of me.

I had been taking detail shots, but for the Vincent decided to shoot a number of overlapping frames to cover the whole bike. For reasons known only to myself at the time, I didn’t bother keeping the frames consistently level or shoot much beyond the edges of the bike itself, and so when stitching them together in Lightroom I got this interesting effect.

Usually one would crop out all the sharp edges and blank areas, but I really love the way they line up with the angles of the bike here.

One of my take-aways in the previous post was to experiment more, and while this image probably sits more in the ‘happy accident’ category, I think it can also serve as a reminder that photography is art and there’s no harm in going a little off-piste now and then to experiment even with the frame itself.