Back in 1986 Ian Abrahams picked up a camera again to take pics, particularly of sport, and from 1988 has shot lots of Speedway.

 

He completed and passed tertiary courses on Photography and also attended Auckland University to complete courses, including Feature Writing.

 

For a while Ian Abrahams was a freelance Sports Photographer and took pics of the All Blacks, All Whites, Kiwis etc.

 

He has been an accredited photographer of International Rallying, International Motor Racing, International Tennis, International Soccer, Rugby Internationals, Rugby League Internationals, International Hockey, International Basketball, International Yachting and World Powerboat racing. Obviously he was also an accredited photographer for local football and sporting events.

 

Ian Abrahams has been to every Speedway track in the North Island except Taipa and many South Island Speedway tracks. In the past he used to take between 10,000 and 15,000 images a year, but in recent years he  concentrated on Speedway and only traveled away from Waikaraka Speedway when there was an especially interesting meeting.

 

Ian Abrahams has been a life long Speedway fan. He rode Solos, very unsuccessfully, raced Sprintcars, in which he made a name for himself as a budget racer who overdrove his ability, and built and raced F500's.

 

Apart from one year as a spectator, since he was twenty-years old Ian has always been involved with Speedway as either a competitor, crew member, official or track photographer.

 

Ian is now easing down on his involvement in Speedway. He has taken pics at Waikaraka Speedway as official track photographer for fifteen seasons (prior to that Ian was based at Western Springs).

 

As well as taking pics, Ian has on and off (and is currently) the editor of the Waikaraka Speedway programme, write articles for various publications, supplies meeting reports.

 

From January 2005  to the end of 2006 season watered the Waikaraka Speedway track prior to a meeting. He also helped a little with organising the racing at Waikaraka on a Saturday night on and off for many years. Ian was the original web-master for Auckland Speedway.

 

Currently he is Clerk of the Course at meetings at Waikaraka Speedway and the promoter. 

 

Abrahams has one daughter, now grown up and flown the nest. He lives an hour south of Auckland and retired from full time employment over fifteen years ago.

 

Ian is an award winning journalist who has been writing since his racing days (he was a columnist for the NZ Truth weekly newspaper) and has also multiple awards for his photography. Ian has been widely published, in New Zealand, Australia, England and America, and his pics have been on the cover of the NZDTR magazine over 50 times.

 

Ian started out working with computers straight out of school, when computers were big, slow and always causing problems. Back then a computer fulled a room, home computers were a pipe dream and lap tops not even a possibility. Although retired, Ian is still seriously into computing and has several computers at home, set-up for various tasks. There are also four lap-top computers that were used to display pics to competitors and spectators at Waikaraka Speedway every meeting.

 

For many years Ian had a photographic dark room at home (for colour) and in later years had unlimited access to a commercial dark room. He prints all his own photographs up to A3 size at home, has two laminators on the premises (for different jobs) and has his own colour photocopier to do laser prints. Abrahams has owned and operated a successful one-hour photo lab and is well versed in all aspects of the professional photographic industry.

 

Nikons are the cameras of choice for Ian Abrahams he has three SLR digitals in his bag, he uses Nikon lenses exclusively and although he prefers Sunpak flash guns, for ease of use he has three Nikon flash units for Speedway. His high speed flash cards are Lexar or Silicon Power and all processing is done using Adobe Photoshop. The printing equipment are Canon, with a Fuji unit, used for the photographic 6 x 4 prints, and a Xerox machine as the colour photo copier.