...but for snapshots and bringing along on deliveries, I just have a small Nikon P100, a very impressive camera in its own right...

Since I'm no longer shooting racing, I've started unloading some of my gear... It was a very sad day last summer, when I shipped off my trusty old 600 f4 Nikkor after selling it on eBay, that lens had served me very well over the years. I still have a 400 2.8, another incredible lens with a bit more utility, I'm torn what to do with that as I so rarely use it anymore, we shall see...

Purchasing that 600 was far and away the best investment I ever made... I bought it used from Ken Hansen Photo 30 years ago for a bit under $3K, a fantastic amount of money to me at that time, probably 5X what I'd paid for my car. But that lens was my bread and butter for 25 years, amazing to think how much of my stuff was shot with it, and when I sold it last year, I got about a grand more than I paid for it... (grin) The guy still got a good deal, the current AF version goes for over $10K...

That lens was responsible for my single biggest payday, ever... Back in 1996, the Indy Car series raced down in Rio for the first time. I'd been shooting for Marlboro for awhile by that time, and the folks at Leo Burnett generally trusted my advice on which races we should shoot. I'd already shot several F1 races in Rio, the combination of the great light and extreme heat down there is incredible, so I pitched it to them as having great potential... But they probably assumed I was just trying to wrangle a boondoggle to Brazil, and passed on the suggestion, so I was free to go on my own, or for another client, if I wanted...

I'd also done some work by then for a Brazilian tobacco brand of BAT called Hollywood... They sponsored the Brazilian driver Mauricio Gugelmin, so this race was a HUGE deal for them, and they were willing to pay me a very handsome sum to come down before the teams arrived, and shoot them unloading from the plane, setting up at the track, and so on...

Well, on Sunday, something breaks on Gugelmin's car, and he becomes the first car to retire from the race... LMAO! So, my workday for Hollywood is finished, and I'm free to shoot whatever I want... Naturally, that would be concentrating on Team Penske, in the hopes I'd get something to sell to them as a buyout, which would be roughly the same amount of dough as if they'd just sent me down there, to begin with...

This was the first round of pit stops, below... Needless to say, Marlboro shot all the subsequent races run in Rio after that... (grin) Same thing happened with the race in Surfer's Paradise, Australia. I had to go there first on my own, in order to convince them it was perhaps the single best venue of the season for photography - the quality of the light there, the variety of stuff that could be shot, the possibilities were endless, and we wound up shooting Surfer's every year afterwards...

So, while several of my images over the years might have shared the pages of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED with a great like Walter Iooss, unfortunately they all had the Surgeon Genera'ls Warning Box plastered over them... LMAO!