Lots of horses

The finale of the horses in Inner Mongolia was the running of a large herd down a slope and up the other side directly toward our cameras. What I was hoping for was that the horses would be engulfed in dense dust, but it didn't happen due to rain the previous day. The ground had dried out a little, but it was still too wet for the kind of picture I really wanted. It was still a fantastic spectacle to see. I tried to capture the forward horses as they gained the crest of the hill combined with the rear of the herd that were galloping down the slope. It was a tough thing to do for a lot of reasons -- depth of field, density of horses, the positioning of the legs -- so in the end I made a composite showing exactly what I saw. This is a 3-image combination: The forward horses, the distant herd, and the mountains. My setting for all three pictures were 1/1250, f/8, 8000 ISO (the ISO was set to auto and the exposure mode was on manual), and I used the Canon 100-400mm zoom plus a 1.4x teleconverter. The ISO was so high because the sun had disappeared behind a thick cloud cover.