First...

My first horse show from behind the camera!  I had planned to do a half day, from 8 am to noon, but I left a bit after 11 because the rain became too heavy.  In fact, if you look at this image in Large, you can see that the rain was pretty heavy by this point.  Happily, the first couple of hours were dry and perfect.  

Soooo, I had a lot of fun and learned some things.  I came home with over 4,000 images, which was really a bit much.  But I intentionally set up to fire 20 fps because I wanted to really understand the horses' movements.  It paid off because I was able to get shots like this with the mane and tail both flying.  This was literally 1 of 3 frames in a 20 fps burst.  I could probably never have gotten this if I'd been firing less than 15 fps.  I was able to study the way the horses move through a canter which was very helpful.  I like shots where the horse's head is up, but when the horse is running the head moves up and down with each stride so again, lots of frames that I would not personally use.  I am planning to shoot an all day horse event next Saturday, so this was a great day for me to just play with settings and get the lay of the land at the arena.  

The shooting conditions and the arena are really good - the fences are slat style so it's easy to shoot through the openings.  I can also just set my lens on the top bar of the fence and shoot that way, so options.  And I'm pretty free to move all around outside the fence so I can move to get different shots and views.  And if the sun shows itself next weekend, I can hopefully move around to minimize it's affect.  Lots of white/light and black/dark horses which are a bugger under full sun.  

One more shot in Extra.  There were so many gorgeous horses there today.  Hard to pick just one for blip...

Hubs has arrived at his hotel and will be at the track bright and early tomorrow morning for to start putting his race car through its paces.  

xoxo
Debbi