Lewis Hamilton may be the reigning World Champion Driver, but Jenson Button has been eating his fish and chips this season. Great selection of images, Jenson first might have been better.

cool

#14 was a tilt/shift photo which you don't need a fancy lens to accomplish. I've followed this guide many times and it's very easy to do with Photoshop: http://www.tiltshiftphotography.net/photoshop-tutorial.php

Give it a try the results, if done on the right photo, are stunning.

@2: Looks like Photoshop, in this case, as you can see that areas in the same focal plane are not at the same level of focus. This type of shot would normally be done with a Tilt/Shift lens, but not in this case.

re photo 14.

It's impossible to create actually out of focus areas with photoshop, picasia, or any other software. The quality and characteristics of out of focus areas (bokeh) cannot be faked. Fakes are obvious to any one with an experienced eye but sites like Flickr are rife with people who think they have made a convincing t&s image.

Number 20 is brilliant

Meh - show some good pictures, Big Picture, instead of fluff like this.

I'm not a photojournalist but I imagine working for Getty the photographer in #14 is not supposed to over-Photoshop a photo. I would guess it's done using a Lensbaby type lens that allows you to distort things like that in the field. A sports photographer might not be carrying around a Lensbaby in the heat of a race but considering he is standing directly in front of a F1 car, I bet this shot was conceived by the photographer ahead of time and he made a point to get it.

Admins - to appease comment No. 26s' delicate sensibilities, will you please remove this "fluff" and provide something more visually and intellectually stimulating? We need something a bit more introspective to really appreciate fine photography. Thanks you very much.

We all know about the tilt-shift lenses create can create that thin focus plane. This looks exactly like that only with a vertical focus plane rather than the typical horizontal. I'm guessing T/S can do this but I don't know for sure since I don't own one. Its not software effect because as #24 said, you can't fake bokeh.

great stuff. i appreciate this as a an F1 fan. could we have less hamilton and more of everybody next time? thanks.

#28 "...got a million bucks I can borrow?"

27's really graphic and well composed !! Love it !!

First: you can fake anything, it's just a matter of how much time you spend.
Second: in '14 i don't see that much of a bokeh.
Third: look at the depth of field! Even Tilt/Shift-Lenses have to follow physics.
This. is. Photoshopped.

Great Pictures, Tremendous waste of resources for such a boring (so called) sport.

Amazing pictures as usual. Great selection Alan!

horizon on the last one is crooked

Re: #14 if you do a quick web search for Fred Dufour, you'll quickly find the Getty website where his photos are available for sale and lease. In reading the information regarding this photo there is no mention of a tilt/shift lens, but in reading the information regarding other photos that look remarkably similar, you will find that Fred uses a Tilt/shift lens on a regular basis. When you're making the money that this guy does and you're at as many races as he is, you have the ability to take all kinds of "interesting" lenses to races.

it actually makes me a little nauseous to look at it for too long. But excellent images all around

I'm almost certain #14 was done using a LensBaby, not a tilt-shift.

last foto - great!
from http://f1-stories.com

Another answer to #2

Could be a tilt/shift photo done on the vertical axis instead of horizontal as usual but the depth of the in focus field seems to overlap with some of the out of focus field so it could be done in post processing to look like a tilt shift.

Im in love with nr 4. Rest are awsome photo's

RE #14. I'm surprised no one has mentioned that there is a vertical stripe in the photo that is completely in focus from the nose of the car to the back of the paddock. Also there is clearly bokeh coming off the specular highlights in the left of the photo. So why is this so obviously fake? Looks like a classic T/S lens effect to me.

What I'd like to know is how the photographer got the light so perfectly inside Trulli's helmet in #18. That's crazy.

The motion blur in #11 is incredibly well executed as well.

Great photos, Go Lewis!

Re: 43, light in #18. Don't know how he did it, but I do this all the time with local adjustments in Lightroom 2.x, for helmet/hat sports.

To me, it looks like the actual light is brighter above a line thru his right wrist across his collar, perhaps the lower portion is shadowed from a TV light or something.

(so called sport?) This is a great sport, try to race as fast as you can on your POS and you won't be able to hold your head up the next day. This guys are high end athletes and talented drivers. Regarding the resources comment, f1 and other forms of racing is where the great technological advances are made. Three to four years from now energy recovery from inertia wheels will be the way to get 70 mpg on street cars thanks to the engineers pushing the limits. Engineers on the consumer side can't push the limit due to cost and regulations. For example the Dakar Rally has been a great testing and proving ground for the new up an coming super efficent turbol diesel small engines.

Photo #23 from the Singaporean Grand Prix edition of The Big Picture is a really good photo using T/S. Even better than #14 here.

#14 is clearly tilt-shift. In editorial work like this Photoshop to generate the effect simply would not be allowed.

But what I'm more interested in is the shutter speed and focal length of #15. To have such a direction panning-generated blur and that wide of a frame of view, I'm guessing it's just great distance + normal focal length?

Anyone have any ideas?

#11 is truly amazing!

F1 = High Tech,
as should be the pictures,
number 30 has nothing to do here,

Four 4 Ever

Incredible photos. Really stunning.

re # 43:
the light in trulli´s helmet comes from antother photographer´s flash. It happend to me couple times: at press conferrence there are so many photographers and almost all of them use a flash. So it´s just a matter of luck, to shot a picture at the exact time when someone´s flash fires.
Also he might be using his own flash off camera and fire it with a cable or wirelessly, but I dont think so...

"What I'd like to know is how the photographer got the light so perfectly inside Trulli's helmet in #18. That's crazy."

I wondered that too, it looks so bright in there compared to everything else it seemed almost unreal. Great shot though.

http://hame.ca/tiltshift.htm

#14 was definitely done with a tilt-shift lens. Tilting the lens plane relative to the film plane has the effect of spreading focus across the image. The wider the aperture, the narrower the band of focus in the image - and yet, the focus in that band can be very deep. Imagine taking a photo of a fence at an angle - very difficult to get the whole fence in focus, near to far. But this is exactly what tilt lenses do. This is very old photographic principles at work - very useful in architectural work although they usually use as wide a focus as possible (so f22 or more) - this image is more like f4 or f5.6. And yes, you can rotate the focal plane so the focus area is top to bottom as opposed to left to right.

21 and a half minutes. WOW!!!!

The quality of these photos is high and they are often interesting by themselves, but as a collection I think they utterly fail to tell most of the important stories in the sport for this season. For example, only the heavy rain pictures succeed on raising a key point, but even there a shot of the field parked behind the safety car would tell the story much better than solo cars in the pouring rain. There's one shot (#8) that shows a highly-controversial super-diffuser (key aspect of the season so far) but the title doesn't mention it. A shot of Raikkonen's KERS battery on fire might have been less dramatic than the brief fuel fire in #10, but it would tell a more important story. There are many other technical stories (tires), team stories (BMW), people stories (Vettel), and controversies (McLaren penalty) that have shaped the season in unexpected ways, making this season more different and exciting than many previous, but they aren't captured here.

Except for #12 there's little indication of what a race even looks like -- the many shots of practice, qualifying, or publicity stunts reveal primarily an interest in posed cars, rather than the competition. For followers of F1 these are interesting eye-candy, but as a big picture for anyone else the first two sentences in the introductory paragraph carry more information, and much of what compels fans of the sport is omitted entirely. In a season with so much going on, it's almost difficult to have missed so many major stories.

Nice photo's.

Though most are obvious how they are made, some have something special.
Too bad they leave out the exif info. Always nice to learn how some did this.

The engineering that goes into those cars is incredible.

The big debate seems to be how the effect in #14 was accomplished.
The focus isn't related to subject distance. For example the nose of the car and the driver are both sharp, but the front tires are out of focus. Journalism isn't supposed to use much post. So I would say that it was achieved with a center spot diffusion filter or it was taken by a journalist with lousy morals.

http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam/User-Guide/filter/filter-center-spot.html

AWESOME ... ! LOVE EM

the holding breath record is just totally a fake..

the best record for people with high training is

Tom Sietas, june 7 2008 with 10'12".

#53, it is not "luck" that Trulli's face it lit. If it is a flash, it is the photographer's own remote unit held off to the side. The big boys know what they are doing.

Awesom 'n good luck !! :D

Probably through a use of tilt and shift lens. Correct me if i'm wrong.

Bravisimo!

I love these photos! Keep up the good work Big Picture!

Thanks! Hopefully we'll see some more fantastic motorsport pictures on this blog over the coming months. Keep up the good work!

awesome pics!!!

pic # 28- what an idiot !!!

Great pictures that gives a wonderful view of the F1 early season. Some photos are really creative.

The 2009 season is at last showing excitement. Great pictures, keep em coming.

How is done the effect in photo #15?

@ 71
Simply by panning the camera with the movement of the car (admittedly easier said then done when the car is doing 190mph+)

View Camera?

I would love to see Ayrton Senna driving nowadays (it is not the the same without him).

Comment #34 is spot on - image #14 could not be a tilt-shift shot, and could certainly be photoshopped - though I think it's more likely to simply be a screw-on lens filter, oriented vertically.

Tilt-shift lenses simply exaggerate depth of field by angling the lens against the film. This still means that objects at the focal distance are in focus, and objects at other distances are not. In #14, the in-focus objects are at a range of different distances from the lens, so this cannot be a depth of field effect, tilt-shift or otherwise.

As for good-looking bokeh from image processing, it's absolutely possible (I write software that does this), and it's done regularly. It's very different to the basic Gaussian blur often used by amateurs, however. Simulating optical physics is straightforward mathematics, though there are also 'cheat' methods that still look excellent.

on #18, his hands are lit up, too, which makes me think there was a reflector or a light directly on him bigger than what the average photographer carries around.

Merlini breathing once in 21 minutes 29 seconds, this guy uses the least oxygen in the world. The most green guy on planet.

I LOVE ROBERT KUBICA he been a new champion u will see xD

pic. 26 best... Schumacher?

To raul briseno... why bother commenting then? love the photos

#75 - err...i beg to differ. i shoot with a 45mm Tilt/shift and that shot is easily reproduced. make sure your tilt and shift are lined up in parallel, crank the lens all the way in one direction, throw a bit of shift in to really make the angle extreme on the sides and unless you are shooting at f16 or higher, the field of focus will still be in the center.

here's an example of it: http://teamronin.com/images/tarav_ts02_web.jpg
(canon 1dmk3, 45mm TS, f2.8 at 1/500) notice the compressor in the background is in focus as well as the model.

This is a boring collection. Show me something related to nature, earth :(

- I agree with #80 Erin Freeman about #15 Raul Briseno. To me, golf looks like a bunch of old men hitting small white balls with metal bats into a hole someone has dug in the ground. How stupid is that? I'd rather watch paint dry.

Just because you have no appreciation of Formula 1, a sport which is popular everywhere except our backwards country, does not mean that no one else should.

Regarding the photos; they are nice, but too small for a 1280 monitor, too big for a 1024. In addition, I agree that they fail to tell the important stories of the season. Furthermore, there isn't enough balance; I'm a fan of Hamilton, but we should have seen more Red Bull, Force India, etc.

Finally, whoever wrote the captions need to brush up on his or her F1 knowledge. "THE pole position"? "Mohammed Ben Sulayem drives HIS Renault F1 car"?

enough about the frickin tilt/shift shot !!

#14 was probably done with something like a lensbaby.

http://lensbaby.com/

@25

It's "actually" possible to do. How could you say it's not? You obviously have no or little experience with Photoshop. That can be done with 2 layers easily.

@82

What's more exiting than 200mph cars? Nature is the most boring thing one can subject themselves to.

re: post #63 (about photo #18)
Obviously there is not enough space to hand held a remote flash unit. There are so many reporters, that some of them even made it on this picture (someone´s hand in left lower corner and something gray (jacket?) in right lower corner. In such a crowd, imagine holding a flash unit off to the side and blocking couple of other´s cameras :-)
And also it´s clear from the picture, the flash unit is much more to the left than anyone´s arm can reach...

This is the Best Blog ever!!!

Keep it that way!!!!!

Regards from Colombia

Great series, thank you for bigpicture

To each photo a different emotion, these photographers are true artists!

May I please have 40km of Canada's Highway 1 closed so that I can test drive, say, the new Brawn F1 car, or a Ferrari? Would that be okay?
Oh, why not?

The truly ridicuous photo, as weird as that of Ronald Reagan burning a log fire in the Oval Office in summer, with the A/C cranked up, is the sight of an F1 car fooling around in an artificial snow setting in Bahrain!

Just to go back to #14.
Very little googling will find out that this photographer does in fact use a Tilt/Shift lens in his work.

You can get a similar, but not quite as good effect using a Lensbaby. I have one and they are fantastic and fun.
Tilt/Shift lenses are very expensive specialized lenses. I love how this photographer uses them. Check his work out.

#86......Any trained Photog would be able to tell that you faked it immediately, and trust me, the folks at Getty would know.

#12 is cool!
When you see Massa in the background you can tell the Ferrari is slow.

Fabulásico

@2:

I originally thought maybe it was a tilt-shift effect as well, but after looking at it a bit more I think it's something simpler than that. I think probably the car is pulling out of the pit stop station at a high speed. I think that probably the picture was exposed for a relatively long time given the speed of the car, and the photographer simply followed the nose of the car with his/her camera so that that would remain in focus while everything else was blurry. It's the same effect as we see in this
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_CKL-Vjr0v7I/SbcmqHryWfI/AAAAAAAAFd4/aFIyS8OkVpk/s400/cowboys+galloping.jpg

or this
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1144/540975742_aff53ce5b6.jpg

Anyway, that's my guess.

Ahhhh. Nothing like fast glass and access. Shooting for Getty = dream job.

WOW stunning photo serie !
It really display the action of F1 racing !
Too bad they can\t be used for Backgrounds !

@95
How could the car be leaving the pit garage? There are tyre blankets on the car still!!!!

#14 was done with an extremely long lens, maybe 300 or 400 and tightly focused.

Gee...back in the day, if you wanted a narrow depth of field, you just shot wide open. And as far as the "high tech" quality uatio (#50) expects from F1 shooting...post your stuff, guerro...evidently someone disagrees with you, or it wouldn't have been here.

Overall, excellent work.

Was the date of this collection timed with the 15th Anniversary of Ayrton Senna's death?

Vraiment de superbes image mais comment peut on laisser quelqu'un écrasé une formule 1 ( même un RENAULT ) juste pour le fun ? Même s'il est riche ?
En ces temps de crise c'est difficile a comprendre !!

schone plaatjes

Alan, you rock! F1 is an amazing sport, very photo-friendly, and you should never hesitate to include it as a subject in The Big Picture.

Enjoy your vacation, and here's to hoping you still have a job when you get back!! Cheers!!!

AWESOME. TOTALLY. Still can't understand how come NASCAR is worshiped the way it is.

wonder full driving in car rase in first of all iam see thank your

Thank you for posting these great pics of a sport I have loved, followed, woken up for, videoptaped, and drank beers to since 1989 when I saw my first F1 race in Canada. These pictures remind me why I fell "in love" with this sport. It encouraged me to see races in Italy, Portugal, Germany in addition to the 20 at Montreal. Now, if can we just get some downshifting sounds...

I cannot beleive all the people talking about photo #14. Who the heck cares if the guy used a tilt/shift lens or not. BFD! What about the guy who held his breath for 21 minutes! WOW!

photo #4 is just incredible ....

BRAVO!!
Amazing images!!

what are the settings for #11 photo , what a great shot

Awesome photos, I know nothing about Formula One racing, but it looks a thousand times cooler than NASCAR.

RE; Comment 2,16
you can play with this effect at www.tiltandshift.com
it is pretty easy to use,or you can do the effect with photoshop or corel photopaint
just crop the desired area and apply a gaussian focus effect.

About #14, go check Getty image website, and you'll find out that Fred Dufour shoots a lot with a tilt and shift lens. Search for: Fred Dufour tilt shift

hi, i'm the photographer who works on the Formula One and who made the picture n°14
I'm working with the nikon 45mm tilt and shift lens, and because i'm working for AFP, we are not allowed to use photoshop on our pictures.
here is my website to see my work : www.freddufour.fr
if you have any comments on the way this picture has been taken, let me know...
cheers
fred dufour

in response to comment #37 - that is not the horizon, it is the
curvature of the earth....and your torqued attitude. learn to appreciate
something of beauty.

Just one word to say- Amazing!

Some fantastic images from the pinnacle of world motorsport. I can only hope The Big Picture will also treat us with some dynamic imagery from the 24 Hours of Le Mans as well as more from Formula One later in the season.

AMAZING pictures!!!!

y have fantastic web site h reslusion picture amazing