Arlington Park - Horse Racing 8-17-14

We had another Balanced Exposure field trip to the Arlington Park race track today.  Students had the opportunity to photograph the races to freeze the action (see first photo) and also to try a technique called "Panning" where we follow the horse using a slow shutter speed to blur the background while keeping the horse and rider stationary.

It is not as easy as you might think to do this.  You are more likely to blur most of the images you take rather than get a good one that freezes the horse and rider while blurring the background.  We shot these images at 1/500 second, 1/30 second, 1/20 second and 1/40 second while keeping our ISO's at 100.  Shot in shutter speed priority mode, the camera chose our apertures.

My friend Rodrigo V and his wife Terry joined our group as well!  Rodrigo was my mentor at the Chula Vista Police Department over 25 years ago when I worked there at the crime lab!  He's been an evidence technician and latent fingerprint examiner for a long time!