First Start

Panned at 1/80 sec to get a sense of motion. Brad Rawiller rides

Positiveley Perfect to an easy win at its first start.

This is the horse photo of yours I liked most. There is action here. I think the photo is may be 1-2 tenths of a second late for perfect perpendicularity but it still works well because the horse legs are at optimum positions. I wonder how this looks in original size.

You are quite right Juha. The frame before this was perpedicular but it had too much motion blur in the horse and jockey for my liking. I have shot many hundreds of slow shutter speed pan photos at the races and still can't say I am satisfied with any.

 

I am looking to get that real streaky effect in the background while achieving pleasing sharpness in enough of jockey and horse's upper body and head. I haven't got it yet. As you see I have only uploaded three to my motion folder. Can't say I'm thrilled with any. I'll keep trying though.

 

I use a 100-400mm f4.5-f5.6 L IS. It's the only IS I have, and I do notice the diffence if I slow shutter speed pan with my 70-200 f2.8 non IS. But The IS has a limited effect, acting only in the horizontal direcion; OK for the bikes and cars but not much good with horse racing, with movement in jockey and horse going in every direction.

 

Panning at 1/80th, I invariably get too much blur in horse and jockey. At 1/125th the streakiness in the background tends to be insufficient. 1/100th seems to get the best result, for me anyway.

 

In answer to your last question, I cropped the image from about 3500x2300 to about 2650x1535 pixels. I checked back to the full image and it still looked pretty much the same, perhaps a bit more fuzzy for the crop.

 

Thanks for the incisive comments. It makes me think about things a bit more and I do appreciate it. Best regards, Neil

 

 

 

Yes, I've tried horse shooting myself. It's really difficult. Come to think of it. Let's tie our observation coordination system to the horse (i.e. perfect panning)- so we only see the movement of the horse's legs, head, tail etc relative to the horses torso. When is this relative motion slowest? It's slowest at the peaks of the motions, that is, legs crossing under or legs fully stretched front and rear. Because at these instances the direction of the movement is changed there has to be a moment when the relative velocity is zero. These are probably the moments that you have the highest probability to get a decent pan ot the total.

Say you try with 1/100, you can still get that 8.5 fps with MkII. The cycle speed of the horse is probably between 1 and 2 Herz, let's say worst case 2 Hz. So you basically have 720 degrees (two cycles) of motion and say 8 frames for that - the horses periodic motion is then split in quarters .... might be better to try to time it with manually the finger. I recently did roller skating shooting and I wanted to get the peaks of the motion when the other leg is fully stretched backwards. Turned out timing with my finger was more reliable and efficient than hi fps. After a little training I first hit the right foot at peak every time and a little more training and I got timing perfect for both legs. I was following the skater and doing this ding ding noise with my tongue to sync me in time.

I'd love to try to shoot these gallop-races. We don't have those here in Finland. Only trotting (? ... horses pulling light karts and not galloping).

Thanks for those further comments Juha. You have given me a couple of ideas to work on. I will go back through my panning sequences since I've had the MKIIN and check out what you're saying. I might get a video as well and freeze frame it to examine the horses movement pattern and then see if I can give the finger timing method a go. Best regards, Neil