Blue Deuce on the loose

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, Homestead-Miami Speedway, 2012-11-18.

Three things I like about this photo: it's simple, it's (pretty much) wysiwyg, it's unexpected. Oh, and it shows Brad Keselowski on his way to clinch his first NASCAR Sprint Cup championship - editorially speaking, it's always a good thing to feature the winners and champions…

It is indeed a very simple photo, but its simplicity has a graphic edge to it, which I like a lot. The graphic designer in me always find it interesting to shoot a photo that is composed is such a way that it would fit well within a graphic work: a poster, a billboard, a magazine spread, etc.

It is wysiwyg, or close to, in the sense that I barely did any edit to this photo. Contrary to what most photographers would like people to think, today's photos are edited, and most often than not, edited a lot. Personally, I don't have any problem with this, as long as the content itself is not modified and that the 'enhancements' are reasonable. But I (like many other shooters) still take a certain pride in getting it right straight out of the camera, and this one is a good example: barely any edit was made to it. It would have been tempting to crop it to make the car appear bigger in the frame, but I thought the negative space was part of the beauty of the photo, so I didn't even reframe it.

It is unexpected in the sense that when I shot it, I really didn't think it was an interesting shot. The violent late afternoon sun was now behind a veil of cloud and I thought we had lost our chances for those crazy side lit shots in T1 and T2 at Homestead. Since there was a nicely lit spot on the track, I still tried a few frames just to see, and kept walking. Only at the end of the day while editing that I started linking this side light, soft but still strangely effective to pump the saturation on the Blue Deuce.

For more pictures from the Ford EcoBoost 400, click here.

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