What it takes to be a Formula 1 photographer

Imagine this: You are crouched down on the bitumen of Monaco’s fabled street racing circuit. Behind you is a grandstand filled with hardcore revheads and Europe’s rich and famous. Less than one metre away are extremely expensive and outrageously complex machines designed to do one thing - go really, really fast. Their sleek appearance is in jarring contrast to the deafening noise and showers of dirt left in their wake. But your first instinct isn’t to run, to hide, to find a spot that is if not safer then at least not as ear-drum shatteringly loud. Instead you close one eye, peer through the viewfinder of your trusty camera and - CLICK - capture an image that is perfectly still yet also moving at 300km/h. If you can wrap your head around that, you may have what it takes to be a Formula 1 photographer. It’s a rare art and one that Perth-based photographer Kym Illman has spent the past three years perfecting. “The thing that stood out to me when I first started was the amount of air they push out when they go past,” he said. “There are some corners where you are only 60cm away from the wheels. “They are not going that fast, they might be going 80km/h at the corner but they move a lot of air that goes through the Armco fencing and up the leg of your shorts.” Like many West Aussies, Illman was converted from a casual fan to an F1 obsessive by the sport’s happiest man, local boy Daniel Ricciardo. “I went to Abu Dhabi in 2016 with the Red Bull package where you get access to the garage,” he said. “ I had headphones on and I was listening to Daniel talking to his race engineer and he was so calm and it was at that point thought this “I like this, this might be a pretty interesting pursuit.” Formula 1 is now a global phenomenon with races across the globe from Australia to Brazil and Azerbaijan. However, it’s heartland will always be the European Grand Prixs which are so beloved by fans that they name individual corners on race circuits. One such corner is the sweeping Eau Rouge at the Belgian Grand Prix Spa-Francorchamps, named after the red, iron-rich stream that runs beneath it. Michael Schumacher once said that approaching the corner was like “flying downhill and seeing a big mountain in front of you”. It was there Illman found himself in 2017, a novice among the more experienced photographers and he soon made a surprise discovery. "The cars are going past as 200 to 300km/h," he said. “The thing that grabbed me about that corner, apart from sheer exhilaration, is the noise . And It’s not the noise of the engine, it’s the noise of the tyres on the rumble strip.” So what is the key to taking a good F1 photograph? How do you convey motion in a static medium? “ Almost always you’ve got to be panning with the car. The slower your shutter speed, the more precise you have to be at moving your camera lense at exactly the same speed as the car,” said Illman. “Some of the great photographers in F1 can take a sharp shot at an 8th of a second. That’s a long time for the shutter to be open. “You’ve got to be shooting between 100 and 300ths of a second to get a shot that shows the motion because if you shoot at 3000ths of a second the car just looks like it is parked on the track.” The fruits of Illman’s labour can be seen on his increasingly popular Instagram page. One post shows the impressive amount of kit he takes to each race, including two digital cameras, six separate lenses and a laptop. This last item is of vital importance because no matter how amazing the photo is, if no-one can see it, then it’s just a bunch of meaningless pixlels on a hard drive. His followers have increased nearly tenfold in a single year to 78,000, a rise he attributes to always being the first photographer to post each race. “(Ferrari driver) Charles LeClerc walks into the paddock, I take a nice photo of him, I look at it, I upload it to my website from my camera, I then drag it out of a Dropbox,” he explains. “Four, five minutes after I take the shot. If the internet is good and nothing else distracts me I’ve got a shot up. “Everybody on the net looking for Charles LeClerc, what’s he wearing today, they are going to look at my page first because I’ll have it up first.” Social media expert and Curtin University professor Katharina Wolf said Illman had found success on Instagram because he let his passion shine through his work. “It’s not just the images, it’s the way he phrases the captions, it’s the way he writes it,”Dr Wolf said. “It’s his personal style as opposed to a team of content generators that don’t necessarily engage at that level with audiences.” Ultimately, Illman understands his followers - and the wider F1 fan-base - are attracted to the human faces of a very mechanical sport. Among the fast and furious racing photos are the drivers. World champion Lewis Hamilton studiously ignoring the trailing media pack, Nico Hulkenberg embracing his girlfriend after what was probably the final race of his career and, of course, Riccardo’s beaming smile. “What I like to shoot is emotion,” Illman said. “It’s trainers giving their drivers a hug, some guy who’s had a crash and walking back through the paddock with his helmet on and all his race gear.” Dr Wolf said in places like WA where F1 was not a mainstream sport, platforms like Instagram were of increasing importance to fans. “It creates a virtual community of people around a particular topic. People are fascinated and passionate about F1 so that’s where they go,” she said.