Advanced Level Horse Trial at Pine Top; February 28, 2010

HoofClix

For you horsey folks and others, a few shots from this past weekend. These are the upper level riders all not trying to qualify for the Rolex 3-Day held in April.Day was chilly windy, light was sharp.. I polarized pretty much all day. This is a series near sundown that I enjoyed shooting, different horses in each pic, but the four shots I took for all of them:

1. Over the "Master James" jump:


2. First shot through the "Saloon. This is Boyd Martin of the Australian team":


3. 2nd shot through the Saloon:


4. The last shot in the series over the "Water Trough" in which the jump sat a bit in the shade, giving a nice result:


It was tough to expose the saloon shots correctly. I was trying manual settings, which I couldn't get right, then I tried just to go to +1.3 between shot 1 and 2, back to flat after 3 before 4. I finally just found it easier to use my thumb to switch from center weighted to spot metering between 1 and two and back to center weighted before 4. #4 is possibly my favorite shot of the day.

These are just intentional shots 1,2,3, and 4 for each rider.. NO "motoring" my friends!

This is really a form of portrait photography, so exposing the horse is paramount.

I hope you enjoyed..

JSPhotography

Nice shots, I'm surprised you didn't crop tighter. I have two more indoor events and then outside into the daylight, finally.

HoofClix

.."crop more tightly," you mean??

I'm not sure what you mean, that I didn't crop more tightly the images presented here, or that I didn't crop more tightly in the camera while making the original captures. I'm just pulling these in from the riders' display galleries, where I never crop the images from the original pixel dimensions.

As for the original captures, the first shot is maxed out at 200mm on the lens. I then follow the ride as best as I can while it passes behind this big wall, and I leave the lens a little wide so that I can leave an image with a sense of the context of this movie set the horse jumps through. If the rider wants to crop all of that out when he buys a print, we can do that. In the fourth shot over the water trough, some of these horses jump so high over that thing as to jump almost out of the top of the view. I have to leave the ground below the jump so they can see how big a thing it was that they jumped.

Sexy6Chick

I think you did great, that saloon jump is quite unique..never seen a jump made like that on any cross country type of event. I think if I had to pick a favorite I'd say #4. Lighting worked out really well for that shot.