Trackside Tuesday: The One That Got Away

Other than the profound experience of being at the TT for the first time, my time on the Isle of Man was also unique in that I knew the photographs I was taking were for the express purpose of being used in a book. Throughout the fortnight, there was a fair amount of photos that I would mentally earmark to make an appearance in ink and paper form. The above image was one of them.

As I have mentioned before, the premise of my book project was originally centered on Guy Martin. Even after four events of no podium finishes and the Senior TT getting canceled, I still loosely held onto the original topic and continued to document Guy as much as I could which included his post-TT interviews.

I thought to myself that regardless of the final form the book would take, a relatively rare photo of Guy in street clothes could still add an element of interest to the project.

However, the process of making a book can be a funny thing. Photos that I had previously considered to be throwaways turned out to work surprisingly well in the context of a book while at times the opposite was also true.

While I still like the idea of Guy Martin being interviewed in the back of a truck, the image simply didn’t fit in with the storyline and as a result ended up on the proverbial cutting room floor.

It worked out in the end, since as a fan of Guy I wasn’t particularly keen on emphasizing his relatively subpar TT results anyway as the image would have led me to do. Maybe next year.

Dan Lo is a motorsport photographer who covers AMA Superbike, World Superbike, and MotoGP. His online portfolio is at CornerSpeedPhoto.com and he can also be found on Facebook and Twitter. You can buy his new book Tourist Trophy, which covers the 2012 Isle of Man TT, here.