How an unorthodox Monaco photography challenge yielded memorable results

Anybody can take a picture nowadays. You probably spend more time ‘capturing’ (to use contemporary parlance) with your phone than speaking on it. The time is long past when you’d send film to be processed and hope that the prints would arrive without unsolicited advice notes (“Try using flash”) stuck to the results.

Digital technology has changed professional photography too. The Canon EOS R5 MkII can shoot up to 30 frames per second, enabling pro snappers to be more experimental – shooting that much film would have been expensive. Now the chief constraint is editing time.

This is a world-renowned long-time Mercedes F1 photographer Steve Etherington is preparing to step back from as he tapers his travelling commitments. Nicknamed ‘The Swan’ on account of his permanently unruffled demeanour, Steve began in local newspapers in 1978, getting into sport during a four-year stint on the Leicester Mercury.

He’s been in F1 since 1992 and believes he’s done nearly 600 races – though, unlike many F1 veterans, he doesn’t have an obsession with unbroken attendance streaks or a precise audit of races covered. Since 2010 he’s been embedded within Mercedes, capturing iconic images of the likes of Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton.

“I wanted to challenge myself to do something completely different in Monaco,” he says. “I borrowed a load of equipment from Hasselblad and came with the aim of just using that for the whole weekend – and it was quite a challenge…”

Hasselblads are the Rolls-Royce of cameras, used by NASA in the early years of the space programme. Indeed, there are still 12 Hasselblads on the moon, theoretically still functional. Although the company is now digital its products still ape the quality and aspect ratio of the larger ‘120’ film, which gave more detail and depth than 35mm because the negatives were larger.

“The X2D 100C is a top-of-the-range medium-format camera, designed for landscape photography, portraits and working in the studio. It’s not a sports camera – you get two frames per second [on what used to be called ‘the motor drive’] rather than 30, and one chance to take the picture because very quickly the car is gone.

“It’s about going back to where I started as a trainee. We’d be given Rolleiflex 120s which shot on 2.25-inch square film, with manual everything. That’s what I’ve gone back to for this race. There is autofocus on the X2D but it’s not quick enough for an F1 car so I set it manually. And you don’t need a light meter to set the aperture because it’s digital, so you can see the results straight away and adjust to get the effect you want.”

Anybody can take a picture – but not everybody can take a great picture…

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes AMG

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“Lewis has a very creative personality and he understands the power of imagery, so he’s very open to me experimenting. There were a couple of red lights on a piece of equipment in the garage – I don’t
even know what it was, but I used it
to make a more interesting portrait.

“I put the camera right next to it and then shifted position until I got the ‘flare’ from the lights in the right place. You can adjust flare a little bit with aperture settings but it’s more a case of position and angle – you have to get very close. This type of image
is easier to pull off with a digital camera because you can have multiple goes. With film, you’d have needed a fixed position and used polaroids to check the results.”

George Russell, Mercedes W15

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“This is pitstop practice rather than actual racing. The idea was to show movement, so to do that I had the shutter speed at about a second and a half – my plan was to time it so the car was moving for a second and then ‘parked’ for half a second during the time the shutter was open. You get it partly sharp, partly with speed blur. The mechanics also have that sense of rapid movement. Normally you wouldn’t be able to hand-hold a camera for that long an exposure but the X2D has a very effective image stabiliser which gives you about two seconds.”

George Russell, Mercedes W15

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“This almost looks like a studio shot but it’s not. George just came
in from one of his runs and I stepped in front of the car once it was
back in the garage. It’s a wide-angle lens so you have to get in quite close,
and then the trick is to use the exposure settings to leave the background dark. I’ve been in and around the team for long enough that they know I’m not going to get in the way – for a shot like this I check with the number-one mechanic to make sure the driver isn’t going to go straight out again. They’re a great bunch – they’ll hold cables out of the way to make sure I get a good picture.”

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB20

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“For FP1 I went up to the third floor of the Mercedes garage with
an eye on using the reflection of
the glass to create an interesting
shot composition.

“And then it was just a case of waiting for the shot. With this camera you can’t just point and shoot if you see something, it all has to be thought through and planned. I was a bit lucky because there was an unusual flurry of simultaneous activity after Zhou Guanyu tapped the wall and brought out a red flag. I’d expected the Mercedes to be closer but both Red Bulls coming in at once, and the mechanic running around the front, added to the interest.

Marshals

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“These guys had been working in the tunnel and obviously decided to take a break on the sea wall between sessions. It’s an interesting spot because, what with the yacht club at one end of the tunnel and the new development on reclaimed land at the other, you might think there’s no sea view here. But there is – you just have to know where to look.”

Lando Norris, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“A classic tunnel picture. You can do it on any camera – I see journalists pressing their iPhones against the gaps in the barrier. But I thought it would work particularly well on this camera because it picks up a lot of detail, not just on the car but on the tunnel wall and around the lights. Black is something digital cameras struggled with for a long time – film gave a better contrast and more richness and depth to the blacks.”

Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“In Monaco you soon learn it’s not just a case of where you go, but when you go. This is a set of steps round the back of the Fairmont Hotel, where you get a view of the tunnel entry. Then you get a certain pattern of shadow depending on the time of day – where the sun happens to be. You have to be aware of the light throughout the day. What I like about this composition isn’t just the shape of the shadow and the angle of the pillar, but also the almost monochromatic quality of the picture itself – apart from the red car, it’s very richly rendered shades of grey.”

Oscar Piastri, McLaren MCL38

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“The temptation is to position yourself right up against the barrier but I made a conscious decision to step back, climb on a small retaining wall, and use the foliage to add interest to the foreground while drawing the eye to the car. With street circuits it’s easy to end up with background clutter spoiling your picture. You don’t want the car to look like a lamppost or a crane is sprouting from it. Here there’s also an ugly scaffolding grandstand on the far side of the hairpin. Although this is a slow corner, timing the shot is still a challenge because you only have a couple of frames per second.”

Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB20

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“A classic Monaco scene of yachts and a racing car. To me this is a landscape picture which happens to have a car in it. Again, there’s an element of timing involved in terms of getting the car in the right place. Apart from that it’s knowing where to stand – you’re up the hill, near the casino, but looking back down on the run towards Tabac. You could maybe do a different angle but I like the straight lines.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“At the chicane, on the driver’s left when they turn in, there’s some emergency vehicles and a rack of fire extinguishers. I put the camera up close – a little bit like the lens-flare shot with Lewis – and then tried to get a car in the gap. This was super-tough to execute because the cars are going quickly, even though you might think of this as a slow corner, and there’s a slight delay on the shutter. So basically you get one chance per car – and this shot worked best with the Ferraris because of the colour. I knew what I wanted, it just took a few attempts to get it right.”

Lance Stroll, Aston Martin Racing AMR24

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“A classic Monaco shot at the chicane. During any given session you’ll find a dozen or more snappers in the same place, many lying on the ground to get that low angle. With a typical 35mm camera and a longer lens you’re tighter in on the car. But I liked this composition, where you take a broader canvas and include the marshal who’s standing just in front of the end of the barrier. It looks like he’s standing on the circuit – he’s not, but the eye is fooled.

“Even so, this is one circuit where, if you wanted to, you could reach out and touch the cars at various places. Again, there was an element of planning because I wanted the sun in a certain place – and I stopped the lens right down to create the ‘starry’ effect. To improve the overall effect I put a slight vignette effect [darkening of the edges] on in post-production. In the old days vignetting was considered a sign of a shoddy lens but it’s now almost de rigueur, especially
on social media. My philosophy is that it’s fine
to use an effect if you could do it in a darkroom – I wouldn’t ever change anything else.”

Race action

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“I wanted to try another long-exposure shot, exploiting the image stabilisation, so I planned for a trip to the hairpin on race day where there was most likely to be a bunch of cars coming through. At this time of day a shaft of light goes over this part of the track. The only element of chance was the combination of car colours because that depended on the on-track order. I tried several iterations of this shot with other cars but this one worked best because of those flashes of bright green on the Stakes.”

Marshals

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“I did this on my way back down the hill. It looks like the marshals are guarding those bits of Perez’s car – which they probably are!”

Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“With high-contrast shots like these you’re looking to strike a balance with the exposure, because you need that bright shaft of light on the car not to be overexposed – but you also want a level of detail in the shaded part of the foreground. So I underexposed it slightly, working at a
high shutter speed to keep the car sharp. You’re looking through
the camera and judging what’s right; an ordinary camera with
automatic exposure would probably overcompensate for the
darker area and ‘burn’ the light playing over the car.”

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari celebrate with the team

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“Celebration shots are by definition a bit chaotic and messy. There’s an element of serendipity when they come out well. What lifts this shot is the added dimension of light – I don’t know if it’s the sun or other photographers using flash, most probably the latter. It’s caught the sparkling wine in full flow. Usually, there are flashes going off everywhere so there’s a chance you’ll benefit from somebody else’s to get an effect like this.

“On the Hasselblads, they have leaf shutters which are built into the lenses, rather than the more typical focal-plane shutter built into the camera body, so when you’re using flash you can sync it at pretty much any speed rather than the usual 1/250th.”