It’s #throwbackthursday and today I’m reminiscing about the only time, I was able to photograph in that most hallowed of racing venues: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway—aka the Brickyard. The Indy 500 is synonymous with motorsport and while I have yet to see the 500 race in person, I was able to photograph the penultimate US Grand Prix at Indianapolis as a guest of Ferrari.

This is how I made my favorite image from that race. The photograph (above) of Michael Schumacher was made during practice (or qualifying, I don’t remember which, sorry) for the 2003 US Grand Prix. The image was captured with an Olympus E-1 and 55-200mm zoom lens, which has a 2X factor so it produced the equivalent angle-of-view of a 110-400mm lens. The camera’s ISO setting was 200 with an exposure of 1/1000 sec at f/5.6 at 1/1000th in Shutter Priority mode. I was standing on the roof of the one of the garages at Indy, which requires a special pass, that I was lucky enough to get since, at the time, Olympus was a sponsor of the Ferrari F1 team.

When I returned home from the race that Schumacher had won in the rain I found that I never got as a good of image of him actually winning. So I decided to create an impression of that win—ala LeRoy Neiman—in the digital darkroom.

I first applied the Photoshop’s Watercolor (Filter > Artistic > Watercolor) and then the Poster Edges (Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges) filter was used to give the image an artistic look. Then I applied the Motion Blur command ((Filter > Blur > Motion Blur) but instead of using the kind of blur that follows the direction of the car, I made it more vertical with a forward slant to provide a more impressionistic touch.

If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.

Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $21.50 with used copies starting around eight bucks., as I write this. No Kindle version is available, sorry.