[Transcription]  “...I think I got the job shooting the official qualification shots about ten or twelve years ago. It was sort of a stressful thing at first to be given the responsibility to produce these shots, and I say responsibility because I’d always been told that every car and driver that ever made a qualification run for the Indy 500 has a picture taken for the archives. Some have told me that over the years since 1911 that there are only a few missing or maybe none missing, but who knows. Photos are almost more a management problem than it is a photographic problem. Each driver, car, and team has a series of standard pictures which are required, and these involve multiple hat changes from sponsors hats to INDYCAR and IMS hats, etcetera; there are shots with the team and shots with just the driver; and inevitably there are shots with parents, girlfriends, and kids, whatever. All of this has to be done on a busy and chaotic pit lane, and always with another impatient driver and crew waiting and wasting their precious time in line to get their shot next. There are usually two wranglers besides me needed to get this job done. There’s sort of a people wrangler who arranges everybody by the car, and a hat wrangler to distribute the hats. I’m on a riser with a microphone that I rarely have to use, and we check off the pictures and the teams on a list as we go. I don’t think we’ve missed a shot since I’ve started but we’ve had a few stubborn teams who’ve kinda played hard to get.

This shot of Helio is really special to me. The first year I had real photo credentials at the track was 2002. That year before the race I got a great shot of Helio with kind of a rare pensive look instead of the usual smile on his face, standing alone on pit lane before the race. His hand is up by his face, he’s pulling on his  face mask, and you can see crystal clearly that he is wearing a winner’s ring from the last year’s race, when later that day he went out and won the Indy 500 for the second time. Over the years since then, Helio has always been cooperative and friendly as a photographic subject. The dude really knows how to get his picture taken. For a lot of reasons, it was really great to have him win the race after this qualification photo, and I love it because it proves that a small team with a great driver can still win the world’s greatest race.”