More Equines

KMCC

Finding myself between sport's seasons, I headed out to the local equestrian center this morning to keep my shutter finger loose. There was a little action going on, but I think it was too hot for anyone to be real serious about it; including the horses.

Balk



She eventually made it over.



The Marlboro Man?



Feel the force

johng

Hey Kent - nice stuff. Like the last shot.
I don't do much equestrian (ok none ). Out of curiosity, when doing a mostly strait-on shot, what do you choose for a spot to focus on? Rider, and just stop down to say f8? Or something else?

KMCC

johng wrote:

Hey Kent - nice stuff. Like the last shot.
I don't do much equestrian (ok none ). Out of curiosity, when doing a mostly strait-on shot, what do you choose for a spot to focus on? Rider, and just stop down to say f8? Or something else?

Thanks for the comments. I was going through sports photo withdrawal and just wanted to go shoot something! There's an equestrian center very close to my house and I go over there two or three times a year.

All of these were shot with my 400mm f/2.8 lens. Because I wanted to blur out the backgrounds, I shot them all in Av (aperture priority mode) with the aperture set at 2.8. ISO was 100. The shutter speed on the first shot was 1/3200. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

I had the camera in AI Servo mode and focused on the horse's chest if it was a straight-on shot. The rider's face will also be very close to the plane of that focus point. If it was shot from the side, I focused on the horse's shoulder.

I hope that helps.