Shutter speed and equestrian sports

I visited the family farm this weekend and tried my hands at shooting live action. In this case it was my sister riding her new pony and trying out some jumping exercises.

From my previous attempt I knew that the shutter speed often needs to be way lower than expected. Freezing high-speed movement requires 1/1000 sec or much lower, and a moving horse is just acceptable between 1/500 to 1/1000.

Bumping ISO to 800 and the shutter speed to 1/640 (F4.5) resulted in the pictures below:



I borrowed my fathers Nikon D80 for this which is a very good camera but that introduces a fair amount of noise with high ISO values. The image has been noise corrected - the new Lightroom options are magic as shown below (before to the left):


I only had a 18-70mm lens for this exercise, would probably need a new position or a longer lens to get really close. Would love to try this with a 50mm 1.4 though, fast enough to really freeze things.

As a bonus, a proud cat on a car with dirty paws: