I thought I'd do something a little different on the blog today, and share some insight into how I photograph Performance entries for photo shows.
This weekend we've been setting up and photographing a Cross Country entry for the Hulland Photo Show, it took quite a while longer to make the actual jump but that's another story!
Quite often, I'll start by just framing up the jump and checking that the background is going to be big enough for the jump. You can see here, there were a few things that needed changing, but the key components are all going to fit.
In the next photos you can see that I added all of the extra details that I wanted, but there were some fairly significant problems. The jump is made separately to the base, and in this photo you can see the edge. In real life this would mean a fairly unrealistic drop straight after the jump, ideally I'd like to eliminate this. The flag is obstructing the riders face, and the stirrup leather is falling the wrong side of the riders leg.
As I take another round of photos, you can see that I've reasonably fixed the edge of the base dropping off issue. By taking the photo from a perspective level with the base, you don't see the edges dropping off the edge the same way. However, I didn't fix the stirrup leather (oops!) and the flag is still interfering with the riders face. I also realised that I wasn't happy with how the rider was sitting, looking down at the horses neck rather than looking ahead and I picked up on the fact that the far rein had been dropped.
Phew, we're starting to get somewhere! I decided to rotate the frame so that it's easier to avoid the banking dropping away, managed to fix the stirrup leather and the rider is now looking nicely through the horses ears. Now the biggest problem is that the riders hand has slipped, and he's no longer holding the reins.
We're getting so close now, but it's the little details that count. From this angle, we've lost the fence judge behind the jump, and for me, the flag is making the riders hand/reins area look a little busy.
And the final result! While I'm sure there will be other things that jump out at me later, I'm pretty pleased with this. After taking all of those photos, I have a rider that looks like he's got his hands on the reins, and looking ahead to the next jump. There's no glaring issues with the jump itself, you can see both flags and where the number is, and finally, the crowd of spectators can be seen and add to the photo.
All-in-all it took about 2 hours to photograph this set-up, including downloading photos no less than 6 times. If you think about professional studio photographer, they will have their laptop in the studio and they can see everything they want to change as they go along. It takes time and patience to take a good performance photo, and there will ALWAYS be something that you'd go back and change, even on your "finished" photo but if you take a little time to review your photos as you go along, you'll take great performance photos.
I hope you enjoy taking some new performance photos and this blog has been helpful.
Here's my little checklist:
- Reins. Is my rider holding the reins? Have they got washing-line reins?
- Stirrups. Has my rider got their feet in the stirrups? (Don't forget, you can cheat in photo shows, you only need ONE good side, the off side can be a mess so long as you don't see it in the photo!)
- Position. Has my rider got a reasonable position? Sit up straight and bend your knees!
- Background. Does my background fit my scene? Am I capturing a contrasting wall behind the scene? Or a table in the foreground?