Bull riders hanging on...

I went to see my first bull riding competition this Saturday evening. It was the Ross Coleman Invitational in Molalla, OR. It was pretty fun to watch the bull riders and bulls competing. I brought my camera along and managed to get a few good shots... I used my 1D/70-200 + 1.4X combo. Because this competition was held in the evening, it got increasingly harder to get enough shutterspeed as the sun went down. There was okay stadium lighting, but with the 70-200/1.4X combo... f/5.6 is not fast enough. I was really wishing I had the 70-200 f/2.8L at this point... well, here's what I got. All shot with 70-200 f/4L + 1.4X, Av Priority, Av=f/5.6, Tv=varied with lighting... got as low as 1/80th, ISO= from 800-1600.

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This photo was about the last ones I could do, the shutterspeed was getting so slow and I really didn't want to push ISO to 3200. All photos needed a little help from Noise Ninja, which made them a bit better, and a little USM from PS7.

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Yeah, these would have been nice with a faster lens...good shots though...did you shoot in RAW? Can you lighten them up in PP and crop them more?