Zoom in: Singapore Grand Prix

The Singapore Grand Prix is a great event - both as a race and for photographers. The night element is fantastic because it is unique and because it works here. You have got a great skyline that does work at night, and I would say that as digital photography has become more sophisticated it has become easier to capture.

When this race was first mooted, people were talking about the lights being three times brighter than Wembley Stadium - but they are nowhere near as bright as that, and nowhere near as bright as it looks on television.

Now that you can push the ISO of these digital cameras it makes it much easier. The first year it was quite tough, but it shows how quickly things change - because in year three we are not thinking about it as much.

The challenges of night time pictures

Capturing the great skyline can be quite difficult. The trick is to manually expose the shot - because otherwise the camera will try and make a hotchpotch and give you a median of everything. So you have to fool the camera to take a nice shot.

The interesting thing with the lights and the dark is that in the first session you have, which was from 6pm - 7.30pm, there is a small window of time when you can get really good night shots of Singapore, with the cityscape in the background.

You don't want it to be totally dark because when it is too dark you lose the background. But there is a 15-minute window where the natural light is coming down, and the lights of the track are coming up, and they meet in the middle. From a small period of time, you have this slight purplish-blue in the sky but it looks like it is dark, yet you can see the buildings very clearly - and the track.

Unfortunately today with the rain we had, a lot of the teams were not out in that period because the track was a bit patchy. So we didn't get as many of those nice shots as we would have liked.

The classic shots from Singapore

I think the classic cityscape shot is the view from the Swissotel. You have to try to find someone who is staying at the hotel, one of the teams' guys, and find out who has got a room with a view facing the right way. You need to be facing down the straight towards City Hall. From there, you are looking across the central business district and that is a classic skyline.

This year, with the new casino having been built, they have got a fantastic viewing platform from the roof of that and there is the opposite view looking back over Marina Bay. I have seen some pictures from that and it is a new angle.

The aim really is to get up high and take a nice big wide angle.

The above shot of the Ferrari is taken from the same place as the cityscape view. It is the 60th floor of the Swissotel, but looking down, and it is a simple shot that highlights the light and the darkness - with the trees on the right, the cars running close to the fence and the red/yellow lines there sit nicely.

Where to watch if you were a spectator

I would advise simply to stay in the Swissotel and get a room with a view. There are fantastic places to watch from there. But there are plenty of other bars and restaurants where there are terraces and close up views of the track.

But actually Singapore is probably the single place - along with Melbourne - where you can get really close to the action at almost every single corner. You can be two metres behind the safety barrier and have the cars running right underneath you.

So with a general admission you can wander around everywhere and find some good spots. There are lots of quick corners.

My favourite shot from Singapore

This was from the first Singapore Grand Prix in 2008. Before we came here, we knew it would be a night race and we thought about what extra equipment we could bring or ideas to accentuate it. And this is very simply using a filter, a star filter, that has little scratches in it to create a star effect when there is light. It is that which makes the lights a lot more prominent.

It was the first year we had come to a night race and we wanted to enhance that. As it was Lewis Hamilton's championship year, it was coming down to the wire, and this shot captures him contemplating the start before the grand prix.

My favourite shot from today

The other element from the Singapore Grand Prix is that it is not all about the cars and the action - it is about the drivers managing their weekends. They are all on European time; they are trying to keep as cool as they can.

This was Jenson Button just before the second session with a huge pipe pumping very cold air into his car - and as it all mists up it looks like a bit of an explosion. He was sitting in a damp cool environment though before going out.

It was taken from above and quite a unique angle that I don't think anyone else managed to get.