Something of Value: Lessons Learned

I’ve been going through pictures I shot 40 years ago for the retrospective on the Porsche 917 running in the current Panorama. It’s been a lot of fun; I found some good things that had never been scanned that made me happy, and a ton of “if onlys.” You’ll see some of the happy ones in Pano; here are some of the “if onlys.”

“If only I had this image in color”   Well, there was reason for that. In 1970, Pano was a basically black and white magazine, color was very difficult to convert to top-quality black and white (I could tell lots of stories about that), and good quality black and white film was faster than good color film; with the slow lenses of the day like my 500mm f8 (officially—it was really perhaps closer to f11) action and night photography at races was often better done in black and white. I carried two cameras, one color and one monochromatic, but didn’t get the same pictures in both mediums.

I wish that I had done more of this type of shot (Vic Elford, Sebring 1971), and that I had it in color.

LEONARD TURNER

“ If only I had done more shots of………..”   I have a lot of 917 shots, but for whatever reason, more of the Wyer cars than the Saltzberg cars. I have more shots of Siffert than Rodriguez, very few of Ahrens, not enough of Elford, and nothing on Larousse. I wish that I had done more informal driver portraits. A lot of that was shyness, not being able at the time to engage a driver or team manager momentarily for a telling shot. Part of it was not knowing the players and the game well enough; this is important in shooting any sport. You don’t know who will end up being famous, but you do need to know who is in the fight and what the rules are. I see a lot of things in old pictures today that didn’t mean anything to me at the time.

The Saltzberg 917s somehow got under-represented in my work. It would have been nice—but tough—to have gotten a color version of this.

LEONARD TURNER

“ If only this shot was technically better”   A lot of things went wrong. Manual focus was iffy, particularly prefocusing on a piece of track on the last turn at Daytona and waiting for that blue and orange monster coming straight at you at 165 or so to be in the right spot when you shot. Lots of failures with motion, but more with exposure. Even using both hand-held and in-camera meters wouldn’t always work with the finicky color film, and my files are full of black and white negatives and color transparencies that were under, and sometimes over, exposed. Then there was the darkroom variable, full of idiotic blunders (when done by an outside lab) or unfortunate mishaps of temperature, agitation, and timing--when done by me. Remind me tell you sometime about the night a poorly attached top came off a developing tank in white light in my darkroom; it destroyed images I had done of Ferry Porsche.

I did very few of this type of action shot in the 917 days; this one is technically suboptimal, but I’m glad to have it!

LEONARD TURNER

“ If only I had shot more”   Often working with a situation yields a better shot, shooting again in a different location, shooting slightly later, or shooting a longer action sequence with a motor drive (which in 1970 were add-ons rather than built into the camera as today). Not much problem now, but coming to the end of the 20 rolls of black and white and 10 rolls of color well before the end of the day was a problem, and tended to slow down the rate of shooting (as did the knowledge that there were long nights ahead in the darkroom for the BW, and considerable expense from the lab across town for the color.) Answer: carry more film; reasons not to, obvious. But I wish now that I had those shots I held back on, and more besides.

A single shot of Pedro Rodriguez in Texas in 1966, 5 years before his 917 years. Why didn’t I get more shots of him later?

LEONARD TURNER

“ If only I’d been there”   The 917s ran in a lot of places where I wasn’t. I went to Le Mans for the first time well after their day, never saw them at Silverstone, the Nürburgring, or a host of other places, never saw the Interserie (like our Can-Am) 917s run. But hey, I can’t complain. I loved being where I was, and am glad for what I could shoot that worked out. It was a good time then, and it’s a good time looking at those shots and thinking about the day.

More thoughts relate to all of this next time; until then, keep shooting and let me hear from you at leonardt@pca.org.