Hi Geoff, On Thursday evening i am off to take pics of a spincycle class at the local gym,i have set this as a little project of mine, i have the owners permission and she has posted signage to the members that i shall be taking pictures and should anyone not want there pic taken they should let me know as i dont want to intrude.I want to do these in B&W for more impact, the room is medium sized and is brightly lit with fluroescent strip lights should i set my camera to monochrome or convert in PS and what other sort of things should i be lookin out for, i want to catch them as natural as possible (all the sweat and stuff no posing).Hope you can give me some advice on this, thanks, Mark.

Black and white would be a good choice as it can be a pig to get the colour balance right under flourescent lighting. The problem is that no two tubes are exactly the same colour. I would do the conversion to B&W in the computer where you have more control. If you are using Photoshop have a look at my tutorial on B&W conversion using the channel mixer. It's amazing how you can improve the results with a bit of intelligent tweaking.

Set your ISO as high as you dare, I would go for 800 ISO, you are going to need all the help you can get with exposure times. The downside of setting the ISO too high is that you get a bit of noise in the pictures, but you may find that this is quite attractive, especially in B&W. I would experiment with the small built in flash as well, not for every shot, but for some of them. If you have sufficient light from the tubes for the correct exposure, the flash will just act as a fill to lighten up the shadows a bit.

Forget the tripod, it won't really help you with action shots and will slow you up.

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