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| Opening Day Turf Paradise! |
There are some sports I enjoy photographing more than
others. Baseball to me is a difficult
sport to photograph. Yes, I’ll try it
again in the spring, but it’s always been a struggle. Hockey?
Yes, as long as I’m close to the action.
Horse racing I’ve done several times and enjoy it. Turf Paradise in Phoenix is a nice
venue. Plus 6 October was opening day
for the race season. I joined 7,100
other people on this lovely Saturday to watch the ponies!
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| Pretty Girl in the Stands |
Getting close to the track is difficult because the
rail is below the track. I’ve tried but
unless you can get on the other side of the rail, forget it. I found the best place to photograph the race
is from the upper deck. Today I used my
Canon 5D Mark III and a Canon “L” 70-200mm lens. A few of the shots I took with the Tamron 2X
extender, giving me a double reach of up to 400mm. Yes, you lose a few stops of light, but I
compensated with an ISO of 400. Most of
the shots were in the 7.1 to 8 aperture (AV on a Canon) setting. This gave me enough of a fast shutter speed
to freeze the action. All shots were
hand held. I could have brought in a
monopod for a bit more stability, but there is so little to no grain with
higher ISO’s on cameras, I didn’t really need to. Forget bringing a tripod, folks. Security will nab you every time you try it!
I edited nearly all the shots with just Adobe Lightroom
5. In one particular shot that looks
like a painting, I used Photoshop CC with Topaz Simplify. I typically use that plugin if a shot is a
wee bit out of focus or I just want to try something different. If your shot is blurry because of camera
shake, consider using the camera shake filter within Photoshop CC. It might just help.
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| Here they come! Edited with Lightroom and Topaz Simplify. |
By the way, if you want to know how I get a Flickr slideshow to appear at the bottom of this blog, here's how: Upload your photos to Flickr. Go to the first photo in your set. Look for three dots in the lower right hand corner of the photo. Click on it. Click SHARE. Look for share slideshow. Then copy and past the html code you get into your blog posting! Easy breezy, once you know how. I had to look it up!
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| Out of the Gates |
Happy Shooting,
Jim Patterson
