My uncle Pat was in town with his wife to celebrate their anniversary. I don't know which one--about 35, 36? He owns one-and-a-half race horses (my cousin owns the remaining half) and his trainer was running a horse in a race at Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia. He called me last night about meeting for lunch and when he finally got to the horse racing part I said, "That's what I want to do!" I've never been. Lucky for me a D100 was still in stock for the remaining part of the weekend and I rented late in the day.
We slipped into the stables and met Ron Abrams, Time for Minor's trainer. I took a few photos at ISO 800, yuck, the stables are dark. Ron was a bit concerned about photographing the horse before a race, said it was bad luck. Lots of superstitions develop among horse trainers I think. He said you study a race and the horse and sometimes it does well and other times not and you end up not being able to figure out exactly why. So you become superstitious.
Then we went up to the final turn for the first race and shot those horses coming round the bend. The track was very wet. Yesterday's races were cancelled due to the mud--too dangerous. A few people were concerned that the track was still too wet and very mushy tonight. Tractors were out levelling the track as best they could, but it still looked like four to six inches of soft dirt to me. (I wish I had time to post more photos and make links here, but it's late and daylight savings time is kicking in shortly. I'll add them tomorrow if time permits.) After that we shot the second race, Time for Minor's rac, as the jockeys saddled up. (I seem to have shot most of those shots with the film camera. Sorry, I like it so much better.)
This D100 isn't eactly impressive on it's autofocus speed. Or maybe it's me. Lots of crap and near focus shots. However, ISO 1600 looks good to me. This is the sharpest photo and so it wins for photo of the day. This was taken about three seconds out of the gate for the second race. Time for Minor is number six coming out of the gate HERE. As they came down the home stretch all I could do was shoot the lead horses. You can see number six is coming on. Number ten, "You'redusty," won PotD, but number six started passing him as they passed me and won by a length maybe. I had no idea who I had shot or who won.
Well, having met the trainer earlier I ended up in the winners circle for a quick track photo, with the jokcey, the horse, the trainer and my uncle. My copy of that was shot on the film camera again. It happened to have the 24mm lens on it and I had no time to change it. What crazy adventure does tomorrow hold? I don't know, but I do know that I have to get up to the Philadelphia track where my uncle's horses race in daylight!
Well Happy Anniversary, Pat and Donna!
