The Gear Used by This Formula 1 Photographer Is Fascinating

Formula 1 photography requires some specialist gear, and the equipment used during post-production by this seasoned professional is fascinating, allowing him to deliver images as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Kym Illman gives you an insight into the kit he takes with him as he goes on tour around the world with Forumla 1 for 10 months of the year. Packing two Canon 1D X Mark IIIs seems fairly predictable, but the gear used to edit, cull, keyword, and deliver his images is more sophisticated than you might expect. All of this must be carefully balanced with the need to travel relatively light given that Illman spends so much time living from a hotel room and typically needs to take an international flight every one or two weeks.

The Novation Launchpad is a MIDI controller that I’ve not seen used before, as it’s a device usually used by musicians in conjunction with software such as Ableton or Cubase. It brings a level of automation to the process of adding keywords, so if you’re an events shooter who needs to speed up your workflow, this might be something that you should look into.

What extra gadgets do you use to make your post-production more efficient? Let us know in the comments below.

Andy Day's picture

Andy Day is a British photographer and writer living in France. He began photographing parkour in 2003 and has been doing weird things in the city and elsewhere ever since. He's addicted to climbing and owns a fairly useless dog. He has an MA in Sociology & Photography which often makes him ponder what all of this really means.

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13 Comments

Best video for years. Great stuff.

One of the best. Very interesting. His workflow is amazingly fast. I am very impressed. (Would be nice if that launchpad had bluetooth too, but it is a time sensitive midi-device, so it has not.)

Check out the CME WIDI Master, basically wireless MIDI adaptors.

Thank you. But that interesting item connects the dedicated midi-port and the USB port. The idea would be to be able to use USB over Bluetooth then, but then the midi-device has no power supply. A small built-in and additional Bluetooth device would not raise the selling price much. This would just be very convenient. Cables are a hassle. But anyway, the shown workflow with this launchpad is incredible. It is optimized as far as possible.

Indeed, I really learned something.

Interesting video, but did he seriously say the extender turns his 50mm into a 70mm?

And he's correct. A 1.4 extender = 50x1.4=70.

Most likely he’s using the 1.4x

50x1.4=70

yes but the interesting part is, you cant couple those two items

Oh yeah. I forgot about that.

Midi controllers have been used for years and years for photo editing via software from pfixer and midi2lr, this is nothing new. Why he's using a big and bulky controller just for tagging and gen use is a bit odd. I use a behringer x touch mini, which is a fraction of the size of his controller and gives access to 58 parameters of tagging and control of lightroom.

Unless you do a lot of heavy photographing or editing, yes, you probably may not have been aware that controllers are available to speed up workflow, but they're out there.

Excellent view of a top sports photographer’s workflow. Mr. Illman is an exceptionally good presenter.

But I’m exhausted just watching this!