Shooting Whippets at Speed - Overview
Before you get the wrong end of the stick, no not with a gun, but with a Canon.
Whippets are extremely difficult to photograph when in motion due to their high speed and agility. It's already a challenge when they are at full speed, running in a straight line, but their agility resulting in unpredictable fast movements make this even more of a challenge.
Based on my contributions to threads on the Whippet Forum and the Canon Digital Photography Forum, these pages will hopefully provide insight on how you can improve your action photography to get the results you desire, ranging from camera/lens choice through camera settings to tracking techniques.
You may wonder why I started this quest and how many years of trial and error I needed to get where I am today. Yes, I have been taking a lot of shots of our sighthounds over the years with varying degrees of success, but I never really gave much thought about how I went about it. When I viewed the image below I took in May last year, my first reaction was: what's wrong with my camera or lens as the autofocus looked to be way off and the image that could have been spectecular turned out to be extremely disappointing.
So I posted a message on the Canon forum, and from the replies, it became quickly evident that there was noting wrong with my kit, it was all down to my technique. The blur was not down to incorrect autofocus, but down to subject movement.
Realising this, I started out on a quest to improve my action photography.