David Ashdown's sports picture diary: Ascot

David Ashdown spent the weekend at Ascot where the conditions for photography were perfect. He explains the techniques needed for a day at the races if you want a picture with something a little bit extra.

Horse racing is a wonderful sport for photography. Lots of movement, all the colours of the rainbow, and if the sun shines it's like painting with light.

This was the Queen Elizabeth 11 stakes on a day when the light was just about perfect. It was coming over the new grandstand and illuminating only a small part of the track as you can see from the picture. The horse and riders were also in the sun, and with the stand in the shade they stood out against the dark background.

What I was trying to do was get a sense of movement into the image. It's a fine line between getting too much and not enough. The easy way is to use a fast shutter speed such as 1/640 second or above; that will freeze the action and because of the nature of horse racing it looks fast and furious and has a great sense of drama about it.

So how to get a picture with all of the above plus something extra. This shot was taken on a Nikon D3 camera at 1/125 second with a 70mm-200mm F2.8 zoom lens set at about 135mm at F10. The trick is to pan the camera with the horses - keeping it on the same plane as the racers, and be as smooth a possible. The jockeys and the horses don't move up and down very much, but by using a slow shutter speed the background of the picture and the horses legs will show a lot of movement giving a greater feeling of speed.

If it's an important race like the Queen Elizabeth 11 stakes was on Saturday, it is a risk shooting from the side. The winning horse could easily have been obscured by the second placed one. I could have ended up with a lovely picture of the horse that came second or third! But if all the elements are there - the sun, the dark backgrounds etc, it's worth the risk. The paper might not have seen it that way had it all gone wrong and it wouldn't have worked if it had appeared in black and white - but as the Indy is now all colour that thankfully doesn't come into the equation any more.

Sometimes it's not always easy to decide how to photograph an event because, and this is going to sound funny, but photography gets in the way. I got drawn by the light to try and shoot from an angle that took best advantage of the conditions, but as I said, I could have got nothing. Next time it might be grey or raining, so I think it's worth using the light when it's there. The conditions light wise in this country are not very good a lot of the time, so when they are, as they say in Australia 'have a go you mug.'

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