Week 46 Back to the track

I’m really trying to get caught up here. But I also want to keep caught up on what everyone else is doing, as I love all the different work and approaches on this blog. So I just spent over an hour reading recent posts by others and I’m still not caught up.

This week and next will be devoted to rolls shot on another visit to the Del Mar Racetrack. I showed some shots from my trip there in August with the local Meetup group. The regular season ends on Labor Day but the last two years they’ve added a short fall racing season called the Bing Crosby season. It runs for about four weeks in November and is a much smaller and more subdued affair than the summer race meet. Most of the horses are local and there are far fewer of them. We had the same behind the scenes tour but things were much quieter and we were actually able to get a bit more up close and personal with the animals and their trainers.

I decided I would use this opportunity to take another stab at the Canon EOS-1v that my son in law “lent” me. It belonged to his dad who was a professional photographer back in the day. I’m not used to so much electronics, plus the camera has a huge battery pack to allow for multi-shot sequential shooting and unfortunately somewhere in its travels the regular battery pack was misplaced so I’m forced to use this one which makes it pretty bulky. Nevertheless it’s a very nice camera with several excellent lenses. After a little practice in the back yard, I set off with a roll of Acros 100 to finish.

I was really having a hard time with the automatic focus on the lenses since I am usually a manual focus person, the only other “digital” camera I own being the Nikon N65. Anyway I kept at it with a roll of Provia and started to get some decent results. We had the same charming knowledgable host/guide as previously, and amazingly he didn’t repeat a single anecdote. What a fount of knowledge.

As we did the last time, we watched the morning workouts, which were very low key, then went back into the stable area for a while. The only other camera I used on this visit was my Polaroid Impulse. I shot one pack of expired Impossible color film.

This visit I stayed for the part where we got to go up to the press level and have a birds eye view of the track (more shots of this in my next post).

I took this shot of an antique scale from England which was used to weigh jockeys. Also more about this in the next post. They really do weigh the jockeys both before and after every race.

Thanks for looking!