>>4423774My friend I have a few simple suggestions for you.
A horse race is not unlike a car show/race. You'll have pretty much three scenes. Horses in the paddock (not moving or moving very slowly), horses on the track (moving quickly), and "environment" photos. That last one could include the attendees, the venue, or what you're eating for lunch there.
For the first and last group, things aren't moving fast and you'll have a (small) amount of time to dial things in, and maybe take some reshoots or practice settings. Start here, that way you can get a warm up in and it will give you a chance to see if you've got some retarded camera setting on or have forgotten to turn RAW on or whatever.
If the weather and lighting is good, all you need to do is hit focus, choose an appropriate aperture level, and let AUTO ISO do its job. You can afford to take photos at somewhat slow shutter speeds here if your camera's image stabilistation is any good. Play with the settings and figure out what speeds you can use without motion blur fucking a shot.
For the horses on track, I have a hack for you. Buy a monopod. A cheap one will do. $30 off amazon, doesn't really matter. It will help reduce unwanted shake for my suggestion.
You *can* shoot the fast moving race horses with a high shutter speed, but it'll look like they're just frozen in place. Could be what you want, and absolutely give that a go, but an alternative exists.
You want to do something called a panning shot.
Basically, you track the subject (the horsey) as it moves and keep it in the same spot in your image, and you keep tracking it as you take the photo. What you get is a photo that has the background motion blurred but the subject (hopefully) sharp. It gives a great sense of speed and action. As a bonus, the effect is stronger the *slower* your shutter speed is, so the slower you go, the cleaner your images will come out (because longer exposure times), and the stronger the cool blur effect is.
