NASCAR Mocked for Posting ‘Contact Sheet’ of Color Photos on Ilford HP5 Film

The folks running NASCAR’s social media accounts gave photographers a good chuckle this week. In a post announcing a big victory by one of its drivers, they mocked up some “contact sheets” of positive color images that look like they were taken with Ilford HP5 Plus black and white film. Oops…

The post was created to celebrate driver Chase Elliott’s third consecutive road course victory in the NASCAR Cup Series, and since he’s the first to do this since the great Tony Stewart, the company obviously decided to go for a “retro” aesthetic. Problem is, they just pulled a “35mm film” asset from some stock library, and that asset happened to be Ilford HP5 Plus film.

When you slap color positive images inside of that frame, it just looks wrong… or silly.

Obviously this isn’t some massive gaffe—the venn diagram of “photo nerds” and “NASCAR Fans” probably doesn’t overlap too aggressively, to say nothing of “NASCAR Social Media Account Managers”—but photography nerds came out of the woodwork to poke fun at NASCAR in the replies to the post above.

Most of the responses fell into the sarcastic, “what’s wrong with this picture…” vein:

Others were a bit more… pointed:

But for the most part, people were amused rather than upset by the mistake. Eventually, even Ilford got in on the fun, replying to one thread by wondering aloud if the company would start receiving requests for color HP5:

Sadly, there is no Ilford HP5 color slide film, and NASCAR’s tweet probably won’t generate enough interest to encourage Ilford to develop it, but it did offer a bit of comic relief and maybe, just maybe, sent a few film photography newbies Ilford’s way.

All we have to do now is wait and see if they re-upload the same photos using a different film as the framing… like Kodak T-MAX or Fuji Neopan.

(via Kosmo Foto)

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