"This is my 11th Dakar. It is quite a big part of my life." said Marian, a 32-year-old motorsport photographer.

Growing up in a family that enjoys motorsports, off-road vehicles, and watches Dakar competitions on TV religiously, the event has taken a special meaning since Marian's childhood. After attending his first Dakar Rally in 2010 and getting a taste of the unexpectedness, toughness, and speed, it ignited Marian's passion to choose photography over law.

Started in 1977, Dakar Rally attracts more than 500 brave adventurers from more than 60 nationalities bringing out their finest team, bikes, cars, and technology for the 15-day off-road endurance event, which is considered as one of the most extreme sporting challenges of our era.

The competition is separated into 12 stages from Jeddah, through Hali, Riyadh, then back to Jeddah for around 8000 km. "It is not called the toughest race in the world for no reason, and it does not matter if you are a competitor or a photographer," said Marian. "It is just extremely demanding, both physically and mentally, and the lack of sleep is probably the biggest challenge for me. On average we sleep around 4 hours a day and that's for about 20 days in a row."

Thanks to Nikon's in-time support this January, Marian and his team were able to locate the latest Z 9 just two days before they headed to Saudi Arabia. "Having good equipment is 'a must' in sports photography," said Marian. "You do not really need 3D tracking and 20fps while shooting a landscape or studio portraits, but if the focus goes wrong in the best moment you need to capture during sports, especially motorsport – which is super-fast – you can't reshoot it again."

"For shooting, we have the best camera possible, and so we needed to have super-fast cards as well to make our life easier and that's the moment when the Wise CFexpress Type B cards came to action. We shoot all only in RAW with the highest quality possible, so you end up having about 50MB file for each photo, having around 6000-8000 photos a day."

Efficiency has never been so important until photographers must fight against the minimum time of sleeping, as each team was challenged with how long they could keep behind the wheel. “Every single minute you save is a minute you can sleep! And any time over 4 hours is a welcomed bonus." Marian said laughing. "We try to make everything as fast as possible. From shooting – downloading – editing – sending the photos out."

"Last year, we would wait up to 20 minutes to copy everything and then we could only start to work, but even though we had more data this year, with the cards, the reader and also the very new MacBook Pro, the whole process got much faster and it definitely saved us 20-30 minutes a day."

Next year, Marian will again lead his passionate team along with the best equipment to the place of his destiny. "Dakar Rally is more a natural development than anything that I would have chosen. It is the most difficult, most exciting, and most important event of the year in my life."

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