Lenses used at the beginning of my GP assignments were confined to an EF 20-35mm f/2.8L AFD wide-angle Zoom Lens for pit and paddock shots and the EF 80-200mm f/2.8L AFD Zoom Lens for candid and the actual races. The Malaysian track located at Shah Alam in the Malaysian state of Selangor, was the host of the Malaysian GP from 1991-1997 and has a few areas where medium telephoto zoom lenses like a 75-300mm or an 80-200mm will suffice to get close to the action. It is the same for most circuits around the world where the Championship is being hosted annually. If you have a variety of long lenses ranging from an EF 300mm f/2.8L USM, EF 400mm f/2.8L USM or the EF 500mm f/4.5L USM, the differences between having a limited number of "inadequate" lenses and these super telephoto versions will be limited to the amount of potential camera angles which you can shoot from. The photo of me (back view) showed how close I was to the action. Okay, the EF 300mm f/2.8L USM telephoto lens (w/attached hood) of mine can be seen hanging on my right shoulder and I was using my new EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM Zoom Lens instead when this picture was taken in April 1998. Of course, getting the right accreditation is a must to shoot an international sporting event like this. But for those who can't, it must be remembered that there are a lot of other national motorcycle or auto championships where the restrictions for non-accredited photographers to shoot pictures are minimal. In Malaysia, there is a Cub Prix Championship using motorcycles of 110cc where the photographic-frenzied spectators can shoot their own pictures from behind the barricades by themselves. Another interesting method of using shutter speed is during "zooming" with any zoom lenses. To get this effect, you need to have an exposure of at least 0.5 second long to enable the effects to be zoomed from one end of the zooming range to the other. The use of a tripod is not necessary although it helps to maintain steadiness when zooming and using slower shutter speed at the same time. Using flash is another way of freezing subjects in its track. With the Canon EOS 50/50E as well as the new EOS-3, users will be able to use these cameras' High Speed Focal Plane (FP) E-TTL Flash mode with the Canon 380EX and new 550EX Speedlites. This mode allows the Speedlites to sync. With shutter speeds up to 1/4000 (50/50E) or 1/8000 sec. (EOS-3) to freeze subjects or to enable the use of larger aperture settings in daytime fill-in flash. On the next several pages, surfers can click the gallery of thumbnail photos to see a larger version of pictures using both fast and shutter speeds to capture them. The themes of these pictures are divided into two categories: FREEZE and MOTION. The first theme deals with using fast shutter speeds to stop the subjects in their track while the latter is of using slower shutter speeds to express feeling of motions on film. With the respective themes already in place, surfers to this site can ask themselves the remaining two important questions in addition to the other fundamentals of photography that were or were not used in creating these pictures, like lens focal lengths and lighting, amongst others. << Back to Main . 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 10 . 11 . 12 .