Gold Rush and Shutter speed

Even though taking pictures at the Gold Rush Days in Old Sacramento was a lot of fun, I am aware that I came back home with a number of bad pictures. Some of the problem was light and most of the problem was the photographer. Another word that comes to my mind as my reason for failures is shutter speed. Though I tried to capture movement by changing the shutter speed, I failed most times. I have also learned to detest my 55-200 mm zoom lens even more than I already do.

I was a little more successful portraying still re-enactors than galloping horses, though the former seemed to always be in some kind of partial shade or looking away or something not conducive to a good picture.

The picture below is one of the few I liked. It was taken with the kit lens. I processed it from jpeg and to achieve the final image, the only two things I did was to apply considerable cropping and cloning of the curtain. 

18-55 mm kit lens at 42 mm
ISO 100, f/7.1, 1/80

One of the excitements of the festival was the fire re-enactment. A damsel in distress screams for help after fire starts on the second story of her building. 

Re-enactors started screaming and running.

18-55 mm kit lens at 55 mm
ISO 250, f/5.6 1/640

Firefighters arrive with hoses...

18-55 mm kit lens at 40 mm
ISO 400, f/5.3 1/640

And go to her rescue...  

18-55 mm kit lens at 55 mm
ISO 250, f/5.6 1/640

And everything ends well with clapping of hands and congratulations...

18-55 mm kit lens at 55 mm
ISO 250, f/5.6 1/640

Though I am not crazy about these photos, I had only one place where I could stay, the opposite side of the street, at this very distance. There was no way to control the light. Though a better zoom lens might have helped, I am not sure what else I could have done. Post-processing in these pictures is minimum and I did not bother to process them from raw since they are not great to begin with. I simply applied a Photoshop red filter to the jpeg files to enhance the color of the shirts and the smoke.

Other shots, like the ones below, allowed me a little more control, and to get closer:

55-200 mm lens at 55 mm
ISO 100, f/4.5 1/800

55-200 mm lens at 125 mm
ISO 450, f/4.8 1/1600

From trying to photograph horses galloping, I learned that shutter speeds below 1/1500 will simply NOT work for my 55-200 mm lens. After the festival, I found a useful app on the internet that can help find the shutter speed to freeze movement if you know your camera's sensor crop factor, your distance to the subject, the subject's speed, and your focal length. Even though it might not be practical to consult it in the field, playing with it before and after a shooting section might help improve results. From memory I remember that I was about 6 m from this horse, the horse was running about 12 km/hour, and I know that my focal length was 125. According to this app, my shutter speed for better results would have been a little faster, 1/1750. This app, however, is not taking the ISO into account, but next time

I will try to consult it beforehand to have an idea of which speed to dial.