Archive for category Loudoun Hunt West
Photo Essay: Loudoun Hunt West (December 5, 2010)
Posted by KLM in Fairfax Hunt, Foxhunts, Loudoun Hunt West, Photo Essays, Portraits on December 21, 2010
This photo essay is posted at KLM Images.
Cropping for action
I typically come down on the engineering side of the analysis vs artistic spectrum, and this manifests in my photography as wanting to see the whole scene: the entire horse and rider, the full pack of hounds, and so forth. This is an artistic fault, I firmly believe. I know this because, whenever happenstance intervenes and forces a moving target to be cropped in ways I would never have planned, I am often much pleased with the results.
When I stand too close to the action with a particular lens and try to get something useful anyway, the image is reduced to its essentials. I don’t need to see the top of the rider’s head or the details of the horse’s legs to enjoy this shot. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo Essay: Loudoun Hunt West (November 7, 2010)
Posted by KLM in Loudoun Hunt West, Photo Essays on November 24, 2010
This photo essay is posted at KLM Images.
Closeup vs context
We were lucky enough to view three different foxes at this meet. The third resulted in unusable photos but the first produced a long stream of (zoomed in) closeups and the second one, in almost the same spot, produced more distant shots.
Everyone likes a good closeup of a fox, of course. With a big zoom lens you can often capture fox or rabbit shots like these, when you’re lucky and the stars align, and it’s a great day when that happens. But that’s a hunting success (captured!) more than a photographic success; almost any shot of a fox or rabbit during a hunt would qualify as success, regardless of quality.
In the second shot, the fox was much further away and out of very effective reach of my lens. This series of shots aren’t very good fox photos but they are much more interesting hunting photos. Read the rest of this entry »