Switzerland, 12 – 13 August 2011
Teams of 1, 2, 4 and 6 compete in a 1,000km cycle race around Switzerland lasting between 1.5 and 2 days depending on the riders. See www.tortour.ch.
I spent many hours on the back of a motorbike for this event; 13 hours/500km on Friday, followed by 7 hours/300km more on Saturday. It was fun hanging off the back and trying to get angles on the cyclists, but also a relief to be able to get off the bike from time to time and stretch the legs and take some longer shots.
I used two 1D bodies (mkII and mkIV), in roughly equal proportions. The mkII still is a great sports camera, and given that I did not need high ISO favoured it over my 5DII for its AF capability. I took three zooms, with the 16-35mm (for shots from on the bike) plus the 70-200mm (for longer shots) winning out over the 24-70mm which stayed mostly in the bag except for the event at the finish. I shot in JPG, which is normal for me at sports events now, I don’t need the same post-processing latitude that you get from RAW when shooting concerts. Camera settings were mainly ISO400 (up to 800 after 5pm) with Tv set to 1/1000sec and evaluative metering. This seemed to do the job for most shots, although a couple of times I switched to centre-weight metering.
