Cycling Photographers - Part 2
Even after getting your camera, lenses, memory cards and flash gun - then getting practice at using it for real-world situations - there is still plenty to learn.
It is possible to get good results with Auto or Program mode - especially if you have an option for program shift to shorten the shutter speed at the expense of aperture size.

But it is best to take more control. You can either go for aperture priority (at say f4) and let the shutter speed vary or go for shutter priority (with a speed of say 1/500th) and let the aperture vary. You should also set the digital equivalent of film speed to 400 ISO or higher (subject to noise levels) to give you more chance of catching the action.

The next issue is getting clear in your mind just how the photos are going to be used. This impacts your camera settings. Straight sports photos can be shot as JPGs. Indeed Graham Watson has said that he only ever uses JPGs - and who can argue with the quality of his images. But even within JPGs you still need to choose between colour spaces - sRGB or AdobeRGB. The first is needed by photo labs / web sites and the second for the printed media. You can convert between these colour profiles later. But sRGB is a more limited profile than AdobeRGB. So if shot as sRGB then no extra image info can be added by conversion later. Similarly any loss through JPG compression cannot be restored. If you shot at JPG quality 5 you cannot decide to switch to quality 10 later.

The other point about JPGs is that they are an 8-bit colour format. But Canon and Nikon DSLRs can provide 12-bit or, most recently, 14-bit colour depth.

Top Events for Photographers 2008 22-Jan Tour Down Under (Australia) 17-Feb Tour of California (USA) 1-Mar Het Volk (Belgium) 9-Mar Paris-Nice (France) 22-Mar Milan-San Remo (Italy) 24-Mar Vuelta a Castilla y Leon (Spain) 29-Mar Criterium International (France) 6-Apr Tour of Flanders (Belgium) 9-Apr Gent-Wevelgem (Belgium) 13-Apr Paris-Roubaix (France) 20-Apr Amstel Gold Race (Netherlands) 23-Apr Fleche Wallonne (Belgium) 27-Apr Liege-Bastogne-Liege (Belgium) 29-Apr Tour de Romandie (Switzerland) 10-May Giro d"Italia 8-Jun Criterium du Dauphine-Libere (France) 14-Jun Tour de Suisse (Switzerland) 5-Jul Tour de France 2-Aug Clasica San Sebastian (Spain) 9-Aug Olympic Games (China) 30-Aug Vuelta a España 24-Sep World Road Championships (Italy) 12-Oct Paris-Tours (France) 18-Oct Giro di Lombardia (Italy

This extra colour info is only retained if the images are saved in a RAW format - e.g. CR2 or Nef. Fortunately you can switch the camera between JPG and RAW very easily. So if you want the best possible quality for that magnificent scene in the mountains - the one with the riders in the distance against the snow capped peaks - then switch to RAW. Not only does this provide the best available image quality but it means that you have much more scope for image adjustment later. This is especially useful when the auto or manual exposure fails to get the desired result - since you have much more scope for correction. Once you are happy then you can produce the final image in 8-bit JPG format. However this will mean bigger images and fewer images in the camera buffer.

Next comes using that expensive flash gun - which with the 24-70mm lens provides the best way of lighting a cyclist with their head down or with the sun behind them. But be aware of exactly how your flash gun operates. With Canon DSLRs and EX5xx flash guns, the default method of operation is to act as a fill-in slaved to the camera settings - i.e. the flash gun uses the camera aperture and shutter settings to control the flash output. This means that the flash gun does not lighten the entire scene or mean that you can use a faster shutter speed / smaller aperture - in auto-exposure mode. You will need to switch to manual exposure - and you need to read a more detailed guide than this to cover all the issues. But, on the good side, Canon EX5xx flash guns can synch to the camera at all shutter speeds if they are switched to high-speed mode - so don’t forget to set this as the default for action shooting.

The above quick summary relates to sports action photography. The requirements are different if you want to shot other subjects to a professional level. There are plenty of books on these subjects - but you can also get some free, authoritive information that I have found essential; see the boxes below.