For those of you who think the life of an automotive photojournalist is all fun and no pain, I'm here to tell you that it's not as easy as it looks. On Friday night, just five seconds after I hit the self-timer to capture this shot of a 1992 Corvette ZR1 on what I thought was a deserted road in Anaheim, California, I was struck from behind by a Toyota Solara coupe traveling at between 15 and 20 miles per hour. Luckily I never knew what hit me; thus was fairly relaxed when the grille of the Solara left an imprint on my backside, and my most serious injury was a painfully dislocated right shoulder.

While I was lying on the ground in agony, my 200-pound body having been punted nearly 15 feet, flying over my tripod-mounted Nikon D200/18-200 image stabilized combo, I saw that the zoom ring on the lens had become dislodged from the barrel of the lens. My friend picked up the camera and held it until I was released from the hospital a little after midnight--thank you emergency room staff at Kaiser-Permanente in Anaheim--and the first thing I did was to check out the camera. It turned on and other than the previously mentioned issue of the zoom ring and a crack in the LCD status display on top, it was fully functional. Good thing as I have three cars to shoot this week.

This is not the first time something like this has happened to me. Four years ago, while covering the 60th anniversary of the D Day landings in Normandy, I ran into a car speeding by and it destroyed the zoom lens on my D70. I picked up an inexpensive standard lens and shot the rest of my trip. Upon returning home, I had the body checked out at the Nikon Service Center and for $270, they aligned everything even better than new and had it back to me in three working days. The service and repair team in El Segundo, California knows full well why professionals rely on their Nikons.

Then in Peru two years ago, I tripped and fell on the Ferrari Panamerican 20,000, and in putting out my wrist to protect my then-nearly-new D200, I shattered my wrist in six places. The bumpy, 200-mile dirt road drive to a hospital to temporarily set my wrist was quite painful; I like to say that there wasn't enough Vicodin in all of Peru to quell the pain from that episode.  Bad move as a brand new D200 body ran about $1,500 back then and reconstructive surgery to my wrist set my insurance company back about $25,000 when I returned to the US. (The shot of the two Ferrari 599s coming out of the fog that served as our lead image to the feature in issue one, was taken just 30 minutes before my unfortunate accident.)

Since 1999, when I bought a 1-megapixel Nikon 900, I've shot digitally with a succession of more powerful Nikon cameras; first 990 and 5300 point-and-shoots, and the previously mentioned D70 and D200 D-SLRs. I still have two Nikon film SLR bodies hidden away in a closet. I've been shooting with Nikons since the mid-seventies and really can't imagine shooting with anything else. Over the years I've produced more than three dozen cover shots and currently have 100,000 digital automotive and travel images stored online. I can't even begin to think how much I've saved in film and processing since 1999.

I'm certainly not looking for sympathy as anyone who knows me realizes that I truly love what I do and things like I've described above are simply occupational hazards, painful as they might be. However, I think I now know why the phone company repairmen put the orange cones around their work sites: to prevent things like this from happening. It's a great idea and I think that I'm going to follow their example. Might save me some pain down the road. I'm almost 54 now and I can tell by how sore I am that this mishap is going to take a bit of recovery time.

Hope everyone had a great Labor Day holiday. Check back throughout the week for some great new content, including our recent 2,000-mile drive of the Nissan NISMO 350Z and our first driving impressions of the new 2009 Dodge Ram 1500.

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svvanburen |09-1-2008 rich, I am sorry to hear about your mishap, hope that you mend well. the 350z was such a beautiful car, i am glad that i had the opportunity to see it in person, well safe driving and happy shooting to you victoria ReplyQuote 0 0

67MUSCLE |09-2-2008 Hi Rich , Sorry to hear about your accident , i didnt realize that you had such a dangerous profession . Although i should have realized after the photo shoot on my car in August as you rolled around in the back of a pickup truck ! hope you recover quickly all the best . Mark ( 67MUSCLE ) ReplyQuote 0 0

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