Out of the traps

I learned a few things on Saturday.  One is that I’m rubbish at picking Grand National winners (though at least one of my two selections actually finished the race).  Another is that I’m equally rubbish at identifying fast greyhounds – an entire evening at the dogs in Shelbourne Park yielded not a single winner.  And while at the dogs, I also learned that photographing racing greyhounds is very, very difficult.  Even the slowest ones that I somehow managed to back are bloody fast!

Shelbourne Park featured in an episode of Top Gear a few years ago where Richard Hammond drove a Mazda MX5 around the track in a race against a greyhound… and lost.  Given that a greyhound can reach it’s top speed of just 45mph in just six strides, or one second, it’s probably not surprising that it was the victor on that occasion.  Nor should it be surprising that photographing six of them in a race would not be an easy task.

The first race that I was at the track for was early enough for the sky to still have a little colour in it, but late enough that I knew the next race would probably be beneath a black night-time sky.  I reckoned photographs beneath a dusky sky would look better than those beneath a black sky, so ideally I would get a couple of good shots from that first race.  Seeing as this would be the first time I ever photographed a greyhound race, that was a big ask.

Still, I could give myself the best chance possible by thinking of the technical details in advance.   I knew I’d want a fast shutter speed to try to freeze the action, so my exposure was set to give me that.  I increased the ISO up to 1600 and opened the aperture to its widest and that gave me a shutter speed of about 1/320s.   Not in the thousandths of a second that I would have liked, but perhaps workable.

I knew also that the biggest technical issue would be focusing, so it was a no-brainer to put the camera into continuous focus mode, and enable the 3D tracking that allows it to track (or attempt to track) objects moving towards the lens.

And I knew my best chance of a decent photograph was to follow the old adage about throwing enough mud at a wall… so I enabled the camera’s motor drive so that I could take 5 frames per second.  If I had been using a battery pack on the camera it would have got me 8 frames per second, or had I used my D300 I could have hit 6 frames per second.  But the D700 with the 24-70mm lens was all I had with me.

I positioned myself just beyond the start area, but before the finish line, which meant that I would get two opportunities to photograph the dogs – at the start of the race, and about 28 seconds later at the finish.

I watched the “hare” make its way onto the home straight with my camera primed, and as soon as it was level with the traps I held down the shutter, hoping that the focus would manage to lock onto a dog (any dog, to be honest).

As the dogs thundered past me I did my best to pan with them.  By the time they were gone past me I had 10 or 12 photos, and they were off on their lap of the track.  A quick review didn’t give me much hope for lots of decent photos, though the shots of them just as they emerged from the traps looked more promising than those where I needed to pan with them.

Round two started 20 seconds later as they emerged onto the home straight, and for some variety I kept my camera facing towards the finish post to my right and hoped to capture some movement by keeping the camera steady and allowing the dogs to blur through the exposure.  Those photos (another 4 exposures) were somewhat successful in conveying the speed of the dogs, but more difficult to frame correctly – composition for all of these shots was more about luck and timing than anything intentional.

I tried again for three more races, despite the black sky, and had about as much luck getting a killer shot as I had backing a winner.  In fact, when I uploaded everything to the laptop later is was the photos from that first race that looked best.  The one you see above, with the hare at bottom left and the dogs just out of the traps, is probably the sharpest and the best in terms of composition and exposure.  I’ll probably post a shot of the finish of one of the races in a few days time for the sake of completeness, and to better illustrate the difficulties of taking photographs of an event like this.

Of course there would have been other shots that I could have taken too – not of the action but of the goings on behind the scenes – the dog handlers putting them into the traps, the bookies taking bets, the punters watching the action. Maybe next time.