Opening Day at Turf Paradise 6 October 2013

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! 

 

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.

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!

 

Out of the Gates

Happy Shooting,

Jim Patterson

http://JamesGordonPatterson.com