A couple weekends ago I was invited to tag along to a Reining show at the LA Equestrian Center with a few others boarders from my ranch. I (gasp! blasphemy!) had never been to the LAEC before. I was like a little kid in a candy store when we drove in: "Oh! Look at the horses! Look at the lights! Look at the barns! Look at the arenas! Look at the poop!"
Unfortunately (or maybe for the better) it was also the day it started raining for a week solid so I couldn't wander around the grounds for hours taking pictures of everything and annoying my company. As soon as we arrived, we had to hunker down in the stands of the (GIANT) arena. Heaven forbid my precious camera get wet!
Fortunately for me there was plenty of action in the arena! However, the combination of poor arena lighting, using my zoom lens, not using my tri-pod, and the lack of additional natural lighting made for a very tough time taking decent photographs.
A lot of my images came out like above before I finally got the hang of. I have to admit, this was a challenge I was really looking forward to. After taking all the pictures of the ranch sorting, I kind of have a hankering to photograph Equine Events. In fact, I would LOVE to do that. This day was great practice. I learned quite a few things, including that light horses are easier to photograph!
The classes we watched were Non-Pros and Amateurs, so the reining itself wasn't spectacular, but it was a heck of a lot better than we could have done! Of course, the slides were my favorite thing to photograph!
The spins weren't too bad either, although not too many people were gettin' em as well as the slides. So the photographs didn't come out so hot.
I also tried to focus on taking some not-so-traditional reining photos. Every is used to seeing the sliding and spinning, but I wanted to capture the other dimensions of reining, which include collection and extension and speed! Some of these images are my favorites.
Let me tell you, just getting my images to look that bad was tough.
As I mentioned, most of the riding/reining was beginning level, except for this fella. This boy could move, and his girl could ride. The crowd (of 10) "ooooohhh"d when they started their routine. Here, let me show you:
He could spin
Both ways.
His transactions actually were transactions.
He went from this,
And this,
To this without an ounce of (visible) effort.
And his slides.
To top it all off, he walked out of the arena like this:
I tried to get some closer-ups of his face while he was working and surprisingly they came out alright.
This one directly above is one of my favorites of the day, even if it is not 100% in focus.
I took an (embarrassing) 415 photos of the day. Obviously, I haven't shared them all here. If you are interested in browsing through the rest you can click on any of the above photos and it will take you to my Flickr account where all the others have been uploaded.
It was a great day for my camera and I. Even though I had to crank my ISO way up (1600 if you care) and all the images are full of noise (camera noise), it was a great experience. I'm amazed that I managed to capture the images that I did.
Has anybody tested their limits recently and been pleasantly surprised? (I know there are a few of you out there...)
P.S. All of the reining images are straight-out-of-camera (SOOC), i.e. they have not been edited at all.
