Sport Photography - I Felt These Difficulties When Taking the Best of Horse Racing at Japan Cup

Canon EOS 6D, Tamron SP 70-200mm F/2.8 Di VC USD, Kenko DIGITAL TELEPLUS PRO300 2X DGX (250mm, f/5.6, 1/640 sec, ISO-5000)

I had already knew that sport photography is difficult. Sport photography is difficult for three reasons.

1. Objects stand far from me. In usual cases of the other photography, I can approach to the objects and get a telephoto easily. But in sport photography, I am separated by fences or something, and I cannot approach at all. For this reason, I need good lenses with long focus length, which are often quite expensive.
2. Objects move fast. I need high skills to set focus on them. Especially in horse racing, they move so fast that I need to do my best even to put the object at the center of the photo. It never happens to my favorite fields of photography.
3. The same situation never happens again. It might be possible to take similar photos when it comes to landscapes. But in sport photography, the same situation never happens again. The decisive moment only comes to you once. You must have the best gear in your hand in the very moment, or you miss it forever.

These are why I thought the photo above is great. This is the main final race of the day. More than a hundred of thousands of people were coming here to watch this race. Masahiro Tanaka, the famous MLB right-hander, is waiting for this race to celebrate the winner of one of the biggest horse races in Japan. I managed to capture such a decisive moment that Epiphaneia won the race with the big lead. I'm pretty glad.

I need to write down three other difficulties in this race.

1. There were too many people. I was so lucky that I got the space in the very first line. But this is because my friends got it in the morning before 10 o'clock. If I had come here alone around noon, which is more than 3 hours before the main race, I might not have even taken any photos.
2. I felt a bit nervous by other photographers' too great gears. Because of the difficulties I mentioned above, photographers need great gears to get better images. There were tens of photographers in the first line, holding Canon EOS 1Ds with some cannon-like white lenses. I think I have spent much money on my gear, but even I felt a bit nervous when I saw people holding such expensive gears.
3. The final race was at dusk. It was so dark that I needed to increase ISO value and shorten the length of shutter speed. It might worsen the quality of image. I found it quite hard to decide the balance of them.

It was a good opportunity to learn how I take photographs in severe conditions, but I might not try it again. Because I lost all the games. *laugh*