Get low to shoot a sweet chariot.

I was recently given an assignment to photograph an automobile race. Turns out it was a race like no other that I had ever covered. I have been to the Indy 500, small track races, and even jeep races on a frozen lake, but none of them were like this.

It was the "One Lap of America" race. The race where not only do the racers square off on the track, but they have to drive the same vehicle on the road to the next track. How cool is that? You may have heard of the first incarnation of this race it was called the "Cannon Ball Run". Yep, that race.

There were no souped-up stock cars, or big race crowds. The cars I saw ranged from Dodge Vipers and Corvettes to VW bugs, all taking their turns getting in their laps on the road course at the Pueblo Motorsports Park.

The Pueblo Motorsports Park unfortunately isn't the most scenic of tracks. The backgrounds consist of outbuildings, powerlines and less than photogenic prairie. When I got to the track I looked around and realized that the other photographers that were there were just interested in the cars and not the surroundings.

After watching a few of the cars go by the place where I had been allowed to cross the track into the infield I noticed that one section of track had Pike's Peak behind it. It also had some construction, a group of homes and a porta-potty there too. After a few minutes of moving around I realized that there was a way to make the photo without including all of the distracting background.

I backed off, got as low as I could and shot the photo with a 70-200mm f2.8 lens. I was able to not only eliminate most of the bad background, but I was also able to compress the image and give the illusion of the car being much closer to Pike's Peak (which was actually more than 40 miles away). When the car shooters saw what I was doing they all came over to have a look at the image on the back of my camera.

I heard one of them say "That's cool, I wish I had thought of that." It really wasn't that big of a deal but I smiled and thought to myself, "That's the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day."

And all because I was trying to avoid the porta-potty. Go figure.