Ha!  I bet you thought this was another post about Death Valley's "Race Track!" It isn't.  A good friend mentioned that once a year, the Santa Anita Race Track holds a session for photographers.  For a small fee, photographers can sign up to visit the early morning workouts at the tracks.  "Did I want to go?"  I was in!

It is fun to see a place like this without the crowds:

Of course, the  real reason to be there was to take pictures of those amazing horses as they performed their morning workouts.  

It is pretty easy to freeze the action when photographing a moving object, but that often doesn't convey the sense of motion that might be central to the meaning of the photo.

One way to show motion is to purposely blur the image by moving the camera with the same speed and in the same direction as the subject is moving!    In this  next image, I've tried to do that.  The shutter speed is very slow (relative to the speed of the horse) and I'm panning the camera from left to right as I press the shutter button.  If done correctly, the background will be blurred and the subject (the horse and rider) will be in focus.  This works great for a plane, a bird, or car but, as I discovered, is more difficult for moving horses... they aren't just moving left to right.  Arrrrgh, their heads are also moving up and down! 

In the next image, you get some sense of motion from the background blur, but most of it comes from the flowing hair of the mane and from the riders position.  Some photographers call these "Gestures" ... visual cues significant to the meaning of the image.

I used a much higher shutter speed in this next shot so that the horse and rider are "frozen."  Is it really moving or just hanging by a string from the big ceiling in the sky?  BTW, this horse seemed more interested in going back to the barn than taking a trip around the track!

In the image below, I managed to get a good background and still sharply capture the horse and rider.

And this next one, captured an instant later, is the best of the lot ... The rider, and horse's head are sharp while the background is blurry AND, all four of the horse's feet are off the ground!  I think this is probably the way the professionals hired by the track do it.

Occasionally there were two horses racing each other:

These "guys" are moving fast ... I would be pretty freightned sitting atop these animals at this speed.  A fall could be lethal!

As the riders walked their horses back to the barn I got a few head shots of them:

Many of the riders wore flack-jackets:

Quite a few of the riders were women:

All in all, it was a fun, new experience!  I'd like to try it again ... I was just begining to understand what was required!

Later,

Adam