Winter Olympics 2010 – Women’s Luge
More photos can be found here.
A pleasant surprise when tickets were available for the women’s luge. As usual, during the Olympics, I always bring the 5D, 500D, 70-200f2.8 is and my newly acquired 24-70. 
I coupled the 70-200 with the 500D to increase the focal range. This helped well.
I essentially set up 4 types of shots:
- End of the curve coming out of a bank turn. They come out high and you get the shot where they are tilted. The unfortunate thing is they also usually come out blind.
- End of a straight away. This way you get the straight foot shot.
- Mid turn. Here you stand as close to the track as possible (to avoid crowd and enable you to utilize your wide angle) pan with your camera and try and catch it as it comes. Listen and keep looking through the view finder. Due to the speed of the sled, it could yield very blurry pictures.
- At the start gate. This is very exciting where you can catch the athletes focusing and pedalling hard. But the angle for this is pretty tough.
- Right at the end gate where they finish and celebrate. I missed this shot
What I learned:
- Shooting Luge/Bobsled/Skeleton, you only get one chance, set the shot on manual (+1.5 exposure due to the ice) and manual focus. Pan the camera to follow the luge, it’ll come fast, so hear the audience and the rumble.
- The camera is faster than you think. I anticipated too early, so most of the shots were further than I hoped.
Without further ado: