Joshua Paul Self Portrait with 1913 Graflex Camera
The fast-paced world of Sports Photography, particularly Formula 1, is perfectly suited to our new, fast digital cameras. These beautiful and technically advanced modern cameras can take up to 20 frames per second allowing photographers to achieve clarity whilst shooting cars zooming past at over 200 mph.
But F1 Photographer, Joshua Paul, stands out from the crowd when snapping away at a race - he uses a 1913 Graflex 4×5 view camera that only takes 20 shots in total, so every shot has to be pre-planned and properly thought out. And each of those 20 shots are manually focussed. Did I mention cars zooming past at over 200 mph?
Paul graduated art college in 1997 in Pasadena, California. After a number of years as a travel and adventure photographer, he saw a magazine from 1969 featuring photos from the Indy 500 of that year where the photographer had shot the scenes deliberately blurred and out of focus and he wanted to recreate the look.
The camera was given to him by his college lecturer, James Fee to try and get Joshua to "loosen up".
“Another student and I cleaned his darkroom and helped him print his editions, in exchange for this camera. I got lucky with this one because the bellows are very long and I can shoot macro with it. It’s also the same camera Margaret Bourke-White used, and is posing with on the Chrysler building." he told website, Bored Panda, in a recent interview.
It was to be a few years before he moved into F1 but has since been at every race for 4 years with his trusty old camera, starting with the 2013 Spanish Grand Prix. And he's made quite a name for himself.
Bored Panda asked him how difficult it was taking photos of cars at speed with his big heavy old camera: “It's not that it’s difficult, but it’s a process, which sometimes goes well and sometimes not. To pan a F1 car at speed is very difficult and I can go through a lot of film with no results. I’m not trying to document the race, but F1 itself, so I’m more interested in the people, the cars, the tools, trucks and atmosphere.”
You can check out more of Joshua's work on his Instagram account or in his magazine, Lollipop.
We have a number of photographs of cars on 100Prints, all available print-only, mounted or framed for the car enthusiast in your family.