Since this was all new to me I spent a lot of time snapping away at the crowd as much as the action. The lady in pink was taking videos of each race. I wished the fences challenge had been current.
In answer to Lori the light was horribly dim and the sky was just white. The whole event was nearly rained off again. There was a team of about a dozen tractors - and they were pulling people ON to the car park !!!
In most of the pictures from the last three days I did levels and a tiny bit of contrast - rougly selected the background and tried to fade it a bit and bumped up the saturation a touch to try and bring out the racing colours.
Tomorrow something different. There is a rare bird in town - a Slavonian Grebe - so I'm going to try and photograph it.
And all the best to Talj - and thanks for all the encouragement.
5 comments:
Happy valentines day to you too. Not quite valentines day here yet but what the heck LOL.
I thought you had been battling with the light. Did you shoot these photos RAW? Sometimes when I have poor exposures i mess around with curves and levels and sometimes am amazed at what the results are. These last ones have an almost magenta cast, I would be interested to see what the original files of a few of these look like. I am no PS specialist but have learnt a lot from people on DPC that sometimes work and sometimes dont.
I have never shot point to point or steeplechase but I have done a lot of showjumping and cross country when In South Africa and England and the one thing that has always stayed in the forefront of my mind is one of the SA Olympic riders telling me that he never bought pictures of himself jumping if the photographer had cropped close, he liked to see the whole jump in the shot so that you could see just what he was jumping over. They jump obstacles with heights of about 5 ft 6 inches and spreads of about the same. I have a few examples of these on my website http://groups.msn.com/equineprophoto under showjumping.
So I suppose what I am saying is try to get a bitmore of the obstacle in the shot too, some of them are cropped a little close. But again that is my opinion. Great shots under obviously difficult circumstances. I know you may loose the impact of the colors but maybe try a few of these in B&W. You may be surprised at the results.
Lori
Sorry me again, meant to add, congrats on these for publication and I hope it does lead to many more assignments from the publication.
Goodluck with the bird shoot, sounds interesting, cant wait to see what it looks like.
Lori
I really like the crowd shots too. Our events are mostly western and rodeo out here, but I love to watch jumping. Used to ride a bit when I was a lot younger (we called the jump seat "forward seat" to differentiate from the "saddle seat" used on Tennessee Walkers and American Saddlebreds). wish I had kept up with it.
These are beautiful!!! I love the first one the most!!!
Happy Valentines Day to you :o) (((HUGS)))
These are excellent and so interesting!
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