Sports Kit

A few people have asked what equipment I use for Sports Photography.

I shoot with a Canon EOS 1D MkIV, which is a fairly old, top-of-the-range pro’ camera. It’s built like a tank, weatherproofed, it’s very heavy, has big old batteries that last for ages and it goes on and on. It’s actually been dropped a couple of times and still works fine!

At these kind of shoots, it’s normal to take a few thousand images – at Ride London last year, it was 30,000! It wouldn’t take many jobs to kill off some cameras at that rate.

It has a 16mp full frame sensor, which is plenty for this kind of work. Most of the companies I shoot for want fairly small file sizes, so I rarely shoot at more than medium resolution. It fires off bursts at 10 frames a second (I usually take a burst of 3 or 4 frames).

For most jobs, I use a 70-200mm Canon EF f/4.0 zoom lens, although occasionally I’ll use a 24-105mm (eg the medal shots at the Winter Run). It’s almost always mounted on a monopod as it’s a heavy beast to use handheld for long periods and I prefer to shoot sitting, as the angle looking up at a runner is preferable. I do shoot a few standing though as I need to stretch my legs and back occasionally!

I also have an EOS 1D MkIII body in the bag too as a backup and I carry my small EOS77D (which I use for most other types of photography) with a 18-200mm Tamron lens as a final backup and for additional shots.

Quite a lot of togs in this kind of work use these big old heavy duty cameras, because it’s heavy duty work. These bodies can be bought 2nd-hand fairly cheaply – in their day they cost a few thousand pounds! If and when it does finally wear out, it’s easy enough to replace.

However, some togs are now using pretty expensive new mirrorless cameras (and the new lenses) – it’s certainly something I’d be looking at for other types of shooting, but I’d be a bit nervous about taking thousands of pounds worth of kit on jobs like this. I’m going to stick to these old beasts for now!