Making ‘Greysters in Action’

“How come you didn’t get flattened?”

That’s what I’ve been asked about this photograph.

Simple. Because I positioned myself on a bend and used a 300mm telephoto to capture this team of ‘greysters’ – sled dogs that are a mixture of German Shorthaired Pointer, Greyhound and Alaskan Husky – thundering towards me.

I chose my position carefully, where the track took a sharp right-hand curve and where the light was coming from the side. I had to walk a fair distance along the track to find a suitable spot. I needed a place where I was looking straight down the track, but not on it. I turned off the autofocus and manually re-focused on a distinctive mark in the snow. On shutter speed priority I set the shutter to 1/3000 sec to freeze the action, and used +0.7 exposure compenation to ensure the snow came out white. With snow and a clear sky there was more than enough light to do this.

Then, as the teams came pelting towards me, I fired the shutter at the instant they ran over my pre-focus mark.

As Ansel Adams once said … “A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”

Technical details: Nikon 28-300mm lens at 300mm, ISO 200, 1/3000 second at f8