Sunday was a beautiful Spring day here in Massachusetts. I spent a good chunk of the day at Harmony Horse Stables in Littleton, where my daughter teaches horseback riding and was running the show for the day.
There are a lot of classes and I covered all of them. Visit my Events gallery to see the highlights…
[url] http://events.dmg-photography.com[/url]
Here are a few highlights from the day:
One of the classes featured participants in Harmony’s “Life in the Barn” program, which introduces young children to farm life. One of the kids was a bit reluctant to get on her horse. My daughter (along with the girl’s mom) coaxed her up…
… while this young rider pretty much grinned the entire time …
“Spot” made his ride exhilarating…
… and his canter is a bit over the top too (note the airborne feet):
And the show wraps up…
Technical stuff:
Canon 1D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS. Indoors shot at ISO 1600, usually wide-open, shutter speeds varied greatly depending on where the subject was in the arena (the lighting conditions there are pretty awful, um, “varied”). Outside shot at ISO 200, f/4, with shutter speeds around 1/2500 (varies slightly with lighting conditions). I normally shoot in manual mode, but that’s annoying in the arena, so I tried using spot metering with aperture priority. That didn’t work well at all, probably because of the lens flare – so I got the hint pretty quickly and shot the rest of the day with a memorized set of shutter speeds.
Lightroom: All photos white-balanced for indoor and outdoor conditions, clarity +25, vibrance +25 by default. Indoor photos are rather heavily processed relative to the outdoor shots, which occasionally have a bit of fill. Indoor shots are often backlit and have significant lens flare, greatly reducing contrast. (I wrote about this in an article probably a year ago.) I refined the “Haze Cutter” preset a bit this time around to make the resulting photograph maintain the exposure while handling moderate haze (Recovery 22, Fill 24, Blacks 23, Brightness +28, Clarity +44, Vibrance +15). This worked pretty well for a majority of the back-lit images.
I shot over 1600 images. There are a lot of bursts, so the numbers add up quickly. A quick review on the laptop to get rid of the obvious junk brought that down to 1525 pretty quickly. Another 35 would bite the dust in subsequent reviews. So I have a total of 1495 reasonably well-exposed and not blurry images to work with. I worked through those getting the images reasonably well-tuned. I selected 500 or so as good candidates and tweaked them a bit further. I was happy enough with my framing that I think I only cropped 2 images.
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by Dave
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