Lipizzaner Stallions

My mom has asked me to attend a Lipizzaner show with her in July, and I'd like

to take some pictures at the show. I checked with them, photography & flash

are permitted. I've never been to this venue <a href="http://www.ci.santa-

cruz.ca.us/pr/civic/PanosComplete/civic-gemshow-setup.htm" >Civic Auditorium</a>

before. I use a 350D, & the lenses I have are the 10-22 EFS, 28-135IS, 70-

300IS, and 50 1.8 The auditorium looks to be fairly small & I can hopefully

get a close seat. If anyone has tips or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Oops, that link made my computer crash...<p>

If you have a chance, go to the venue beforehand and check the amount of light you are going to have. Even if you've got EX550 or EX580 the flash isn't going to carry a hugely long distance. You may have to go up with ISO-figures and go to lenses with wide apertures. If you need to go over ISO 400, I'd only use RAW (well, I would use RAW in anycase) because it will give you extra two stops while RAW->jpg conversion. In other words you can under expose up to two stops if you use RAW.<p>

Focal length -wise I think what you need is going to be 50-200 range. Unfortunately neither of your IS lenses is particularly powerfull in regard with aperture (f/3.5-5.6) and neither (?) has a panning mode IS.<p>

Exposure time -wise you need to realize that while the horses move fairly slowly and it is natural to pan, relative speeds (like a leg going backwards while galloping forwards, or head going up and down while body is going forwards) are high and thus you need to go to quite fast exposure times if you want to freeze while panning. With horses it is extremely easy to do over motion blur. A horse galloping 50 km/h is quite another thing as, say, a car going the same speed. The car has no relative motion in it and it's thus easier to pan.

If you're doing this without contact the Civic Auditorium management, you may find yourself unable to stay at the event. See <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Gl09">this thread.</a> Always find out in advance what is allowed and not allowed.

Sorry about that, Juha! It's just a Quick-time panorama showing the inside of the auditorium, and the windows appear to be small and not too numerous. The 70-300 does have mode 2 panning, but you're right - it's not a fast lens. I appreciate the advice. <br>

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Jeff - you make a good point. I thought it was enough to check w/ the Lipizzaner people, but now I have an email in to the Auditorium as well to find out their policy. Thanks! - T

Thanks for the responses. It was indeed a challenge shooting indoors like that, and I got many phots where a head was blurred due to too slow shutter speeds. Here's a link to some of the more sucessful shots, though I'm still going thru them all

 

<a href="http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=621885" >show photos</a>