Heintzmen's bad black Mazda.

I came across this Mazda Miata last weekend at the SCCA Great Salt Race. This is not your typical Miata this one is fast, fast, fast and on top of that it's black. It is not perfect, in fact it has a few battle scars. I just picked out five photos to post tonight. I have quite a number of other photos and I'll get around to posting them soon.

Thursday practice at Miller May 23, 2008

Random photos at Miller:

Today was practice day at Miller. The day was cool and cloudy with traces of rain now and then. Check out the mountains in some of the shots. That is fresh snow on them. Other than that it was a nice day. I think that there will be at least twice as many car tomorrow. It is beginningto look like several of the fields will be quite interesting. So far about five Storh's have arrived for practice, and about the same number of Formula Atlantics. Hopefully the weather will hold out. I'm not going to hold my breath though, the weather person is still predicting some thunder showers for the weekend.

Today some random photos taken today at Miller.

Porsche's at Miller

Last weekend was the ALMS race at Miller. Today I am posting five photos of various Porsches racing at Miller.

ALMS at Miller Random photos

The ALMS race weekend is over. Thank goodness, that was a lot of work. I took a lot of my photos of the Star Mazda race, but I managed to include photos of some of the other races. Like I took about 3,000 photos. two or three even turned out fair. I got to meet some of the drivers and found some new photo locations. I also learned more about which part of the track is best at what time of the day. The sun light in Utah is really harsh and to get the best exposure you need to move with the sun form one end of the track to the other.

This race was put on by IMSA and therefore they took charge of the issuing of photos vests. They have some really nice blue vest with IMSA badges and photo on them. The advantage of the vest was that it gave me full access to the track and the pits. Another advantage was that I could get pretty girls to pose for me. Of course they do that for all of the shooters if they ask. I was so worn out that I didn't stay for the main races today, and beside I had some family stuff that really needed to be done.

I am going to post just a few random pictures today with no particular theme. The same as I did on my other site hotwheels-paul

http://hotwheels-paul.spaces.live.com/

I know that I have been terribly remiss in my posts. Things are better now. I think that I am over my slight blue funk of last week. The magazine has been heard from and everything is fine. I only have tonght and tomorrow to work then it is the ALMS weekend at Miller. She Who Must be Obeyed has decreed that we need to re-arrange the two upstairs bedrooms. Today I have been moving furniture out of them so that the carpet cleaners can come out and clean them tomorrow. The carpet cleaners will be here by about 10 a.m., I will still have to get up early to take down the bed as it has to be moved anyway. Oh yes, tonight is my late shift at the Shuttle company, this means that I most likely will not be home till about 3:30 or 4 a.m. and then I still have to go to work tomorrow night.

I will try and file a report and post a few pictures late Thursday night.

ALMS at Miller

Next weekend is the ALMS races at Miller. I am going to spend four full days at the track. The good thing is that it doesn't cost me anything other than gas money. I have photo journalist credentials for the race weekend. I believe that Miller is even buying breakfast, lunch and dinner and I have full access to the track and all facilities including the club house and pit lane.

My primary focus on the weekend is the open wheel races and in as much as these are the support races I will have plenty of time to devote to the ALMS cars. During the ALMS race I will most likely spend most of my time out on the track. I do plan on taking as many pictures of all of the cars in the pits. I expect that I shall fill a lot of memory cards during this weekend.

It should be an interesting weekend.

Chevrolet Camaro's at Miller.

All I am going to do is to publish a few photos of Camaro's racing at Miller.

Road Racing Camaro's

More photos of road racing Camaro's at Miller.

A thought that occurred to me:

The other day at work I go to talking to one of my customers and the conversation turned to one of my favorite subjects, racing and Miller. To start with the only other paved raced track in Utah is Rocky Mountain Raceway which is a 3/8 mile oval and drag strip. Miller is a 4 1/2 mile road race facility. Anyway back to my conversation, this fellow felt that he most likely wouldn't go out to Miller as he did not agree with Larry Miller's politics. Now I have no idea what Larry's politics are and I could give a damn what they are. For one thing I never really liked Adolph Hitler's politics, but he did build the Nurburgring race track. The Nurburgring is in my humble opinion the greatest race track ever created. Larry Miller built Miller Motorsports Park and I say on behalf of all Utahan's thank you Larry. Politics be damned, Utah has a world class racing facility.

My artsy photo at Miller:

Opinions and whom you seek to give you and opinion is sort of an art form in itself. The other day I sent a copy of my photo to three people and asked for their opinion. Two of those are photographers and the third is of the artistic bent. The two photographers did not like or understand the photo. The person with the artistic bent liked the photo. I was beginning to doubt my eye and what I thought might be a fairly good piece of art. I then sent it to another person in Canada who is an artist. He made a couple of slight changes, like making the colors brighter and adding some wording to the photo. He understood the photograph.

I now just have to find a use for the photo as it is and maybe I have learned something. I still need to learn more about working with the photos once I have the picture taken. I can see that I need to take some classes in Adobe Photoshop.

The other thing that I have learned is that if you seek opinions maybe, just maybe it would help to know or at least have an idea of your opinion givers. Will the opinion giver be giving technical advice or true artistic advice? Knowing what you are seeking in an opinion will help you to receive the constructive opinion that you are seeking. In this case I was looking for an artistic opinion and I received that from the artists. The photographers gave me technical opinions in that they thought the photo was blurry and that they couldn’t tell what it was a picture of and generally didn’t like the photo. I found that just a little bit strange.
Special thanks to Paul C. for his advice and opinion.