After 2 months with the 70-300mm f/4-5.6L i'm loving it more and more. If doing portraits or candid people shots, i'll go straight to the 85mm f/1.8. This is great daytime sports lens , period.

Here's a sample surfing gallery i took, all shot with a 7D. Most are at f/8, ISO 100, 1/1000.

link

Nice job

I absolutely rate the canon g12. It is small, 5X, awesome in low light (better than any other camera that i have checked out that is not an SLR) and has a long battery life (big battery), it even does the blurry depth of field thing to some extent. I have soaked mine and dried it out (took long time) and it came back to life too.

It is so good that canon has reduced the zoom over the years from 6x (g9) to 5x(g10 /12) to 4x this year (fro g1x i think it is) for fear of eating into the more profitable market where everyone lugs around a heavy bag of equipment way beyond what is really needed for most people.

I dont get it ?

We are talking kitesurfing, right ?

Of course in theory high mpixel excellent cameras (the G12 is not one of these) can be cropped huge, to give a good shot somewhere in the middle of the picture, true.

BUT, it wont work, as the focus and metering/exposure could be WAY off, as we are taking pictures from only very low over waterlevel often, and the kitesurfer a far distance out usually - the WORST possible scenario if not sufficient zoom.

Sometimes you want to go further away from the shore, to get up higher, in order to take good shots where the waves are not blocking the view - which makes it even worse if little zoom only...

So I would say that something around 800mm (in 35mm terms), or 500mm in DSLR terms, would be a must in order to take good general kitesurfing shots.

Maybe one could get away with a small 5-600mm (3-400mm in DSLR) if quite close to the kitesurfer - but this is most often not the case, is my experience
And if a really good spot focus high pixel camera, even 450mm (280mm in DSLR) could one sometimes get away with fine

The G12 goes from 28mm to 140mm only (35mm terms), which I find useless for most kitesurfing (or surfing or windsurfing) scenarios

An awesome overall camera with good IQ, but not for sports like this IMO

Peter

With a g12 you can replace a telephoto lens with theese:

and

Erlend so right

I love g-series and the insides of them are the same as the entry level dale....however ir is really hard to get good kiting shots because of the trigger delay.

Oh - sorry, I didnt know we were talking watercasing shots swimming - that is another ballgame, where 28-140mm is actually pretty bullseye yes

Its just, around here the water is around 40F now in the spring (and only just above or close to 32 in winther) - so not an option to shoot photos that way, besides in the summer when up to 70F (or at exotic places)

Peter

some pics i took with it, for sure you need your legs for some zoom too but it is pretty awesome. would really like a 400mm fro surf stuff although i can often get a good enough crop from a long way away with web resolution, not going to be printed in no mags tho!

nice spots! and shots

here's a proper kite session with the 70-300mm L at our local spot.

I have a 300/4L, a 70-200/4L and a 1.4x extender. I almost always end up bringing the 70-200 + extender when going abroad. You get a huge range for various scenes and it's well worth the money.