Most of my professional career has been spent creating candid portraits of sports figures, politicians, models, and private clients. My favorite tool is existing light. So when I saw this scene reflecting in a window as I worked over a light box reviewing my slide archives, it was something that I had to capture. This photograph now serves as my introductory photograph on my web site www.davidallio.com.
Self-Portrait | ©2012 David Allio
For the past several years, I have been working to get my racing photo archives scanned from silver-based film to a digital format. This has required endless hours of sorting negatives and slides at a light box. Fortunately, the negatives have been filed by track and date, and most of the Kodachrome and Fujichrome slides have been labeled. But in the haste of the moment, some slides – now 20, 30, or more years old – were not cataloged when they were processed. So now, I am spending time at the light box sorting and filing in preparation for digital scanning and captioning.
In the days before digital photography, chromes were the best way to have a color photograph published. Now, in order to continue to share those images, they must be scanned into a digital format and captions embedded into the digital files.
Today, www.racingphotoarchives.com is one year old. In that leap year, 366 original motorsports photographs have been presented in the daily blog. Looking ahead, 365 will be required for a daily presentation this coming year. In total, my photography archives contain over 300,000 photographs – digital and film – spanning over four decades of various forms of motorsports.
Anyway, as I was saying, this scene – originally seen reflected in a window – seems to capture me in this moment of my life. In many ways it is an old school moment because of the stacks of film slides and light box that represent a previous era in photography. However, it is also representative of me, now, as I work to bring history into a more modern format. That should be the goal of any portrait – to tell a story of a moment in time.
The lighting is not flattering. I look old, much older than the teenager I was when I began my career in motorsports. But, I have earned every age line in my face – frame by frame and lap by lap.
Camera: Nikon D3 | Lens: Nikkor AF Zoom 24-70mm f/2.8G | Focal Length: 36mm | Exposure: f/8 – 1/6th of a second – ISO 1000
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