A lot of people ask why we don't sell the photos we take on the day.  After all, printers are cheap, and it would be easy to set one up in the pits or car park, and print of photos all day.  It's a ticket to print money.

There are several reasons we don't do this, and never will.

Firstly, there is the print itself.  The ink used in DIY printers has a tendency to fade over time, usually the warm colours (red, yellow etc), and you're left with a bluish, faded print that kind of resembles the one you were sold three months ago.  It is possible to buy printers that use colour fast inks, but they are far from portable, and the running costs inhibit their practicality.

Secondly, and for us, the most important reason, is quality.  We don't believe in taking a photo, downloading it from the camera and assuming the job is done.  A lot of people do, and that's their choice, but we don't.  Downloading onto the computer is merely the beginning for us, and the start of a long, tedious, monotonous task, but an essential one.

The first step is to sort the photos, keepers, or not.  Some 'experts' refer to this as pixel peeping, and frown upon it, instead insisting that a good photo is about composition, and layout, and depth.  For us, that's just an excuse for keeping a photo that in the end, is blurry, and we don't sell blurry photos.  The amount of photos we delete is huge, easily over half.  The main reason our photos are blurry is we shoot at low shutter speeds, trying to capture the essence of motion and speed.  If a car is traveling at 100km/h, the photo should relay that, not show a car with stationary wheels and a sharp background.  Its hard to get perfect every time, and a lot of shots don't work, so we delete them.

An example:

Take these two photos.  They look similar, and some photographers would gladly sell you both of them.  But not us.

Closer inspection shows the first photo is sharp, and despite lacking some colour balance and composition, both which can be adjusted, it's a perfectly acceptable shot.

Closer inspection of the second shot reveals that despite looking OK, its actually a bit soft, with no sharp lines or edges.  This photo never made it past the download stage, and was rejected.

It may seem harsh, but we are our toughest critic.  We are sticklers for quality, and spend countless hours inspecting, editing, adjusting and tweaking each and every single photo we present. 

It all starts on site when we take the photo, as that is where the quality begins. There are no shortcuts, no magic programs that magically fix everything, if it's a bad photo in the camera, it will always be a bad photo.

For every hour we shoot, we spend an hour sorting and editing, so there is no practical way to sell photos on the day.

We'd prefer to take our time, make sure everything is up to scratch, and then offer our shots to be viewed.