April 16, 2012

Most of us work in an office or cubicle, but if you are lucky enough to be a race car driver your office is the cockpit. If you are lucky enough to be a musician the stage is your office.  Those jobs are very similar in many ways.  Both demand a lot of brain power and both require stamina because the work environment can change at any second.  Your reflexes need to be quick and you must have the ability to focus only on the task at hand.   Both, hopefully, are in front of a large and excited crowd interested in what you are doing.  Adrenaline pours through the body of the musician on stage or the race car driver in the cockpit.  I feel the same thing when I photograph them! It really is alot of fun for me.

In 2003, after years of photographing race car drivers I wanted to find a different angle, a different view that we don't see very often, a view to call my own.  I thought a view of the race car driver from above, in his office, would be an interesting angle.  On pit lane one day, I put the Nikon directly above Indy Car driver Tiago Monteiro, who I was photographing for Fittipaldi-Dingman Racing.  There it was!  I knew I had something good there.  This started my cockpit photograph library.  It is a difficult photograph to take because I am shooting blind with just putting the camera above the driver and firing away.  Digital photography makes that so easy,  but in 2003, those first cockpit pictures were taken with film.  I did not make the switch to digital until 2005.

My cockpit photographs have traveled around the world since then and all of a sudden it seems that the racing world is catching on.  I see other photographers doing and publishing the same thing!  It is a nice compliment and I believe that maybe I started a little something way back in 2003.  I'm not sure, maybe I didn't start it, but it is a cool view, isn't it?

Thanks,

Rich Zimmermann