The Australian Carriage Driving Society. held a two-day event at the Carbery Estate horse stud at Mullengandra, just north of my home.
I used a Nikon F6 with Portra 800 for colour and an F3 with Ilford XP2 Super for black and white photography.
My F6 lens for the event was the Nikon 70-200mm f/4G, locked at f/5.6 for the entire event. VR was switched off as all shutter speeds were well above 1/1000.
All images were scanned as 19MP files then cropped (mostly to 16x9) in DxO PhotoLab.
At first I shot at the warm up paddock and main driveway as the single-horse carriages prepared for their events. All colour images were overexposed by one stop, which I think gets the best image quality from Portra 800.
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On day two I did my best to catch the spectacle of the obstacle courses. Competitors came in from a Marathon course (up to 18km) around the expansive Lumeah property.
Carriages with one, two or four horses negotiated tight courses of various designs. Beginners were easy enough to catch but advanced drivers were in and out in under 40 seconds, giving me little time to get into position and fire a few frames.
The F6 scored 100% for focus and exposure accuracy over the two rolls I used. As usual, the extremely short reaction time of the F6 allowed me to time my shots exactly as I wished. I used the AF-On rear focus button to track each shot before firing.
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Using the F3 with a 70-200mm f/4-5.6 push-pull zoom required some forward planning for position and focus. In hindsight I could have bought the F75 for B&W and used the same auto-focus lens as I did on the F6.
However, the results were pleasing. The F3 is a joy to use under any circumstances. Simple controls and a huge viewfinder lets me concentrate on framing, not worrying about pushing buttons as I shoot.
Much as I love the F6 to track high speed action with group focusing, it does take a fair amount of brain space to control. The F3 just works. I set the aperture at f/8, the speed dial to ‘A’, pre-focused and fired as the horses appeared.
The Ilford film gave me a completely different experience. I wondered if I would miss the colour of the obstacles, riders and carriages, but the results showed me why B&W is still so popular.
There was a very slight sepia toning to the scans that I left untouched. Shooting at E.I. 250 seemed about right, overexposing a little from box speed. I will conduct some scientific testing with Ilford in the F3. B&W is most rewarding.
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