Horses Of Kentucky On A Saturday Afternoon

Melissa and I went out and took photographs of some horses for my assignment this afternoon.  Here are some of my favorites.

Really wanted to get an awesome eye picture.  The 85MM F1.8 does the trick.  This horse was close to the fence.

The rest of these shots were with my 70–200 lens as the horses wasn’t usually close to me.  This next shot was in terrible light.  When seeing a horse along the side of the road in a fenced area I don’t get to pick the best position for lighting.  I have to take what I get.  This poor position caused heavy back lighting which resulted in a low contrast shot.  Using photoshop I increased the contrast and silhouette the horse a bit to give it an artsy look.   This is an example of a confirmation shot.

This was a friendly horse who came up to the fence.

In January you can see that the blue grass is anything but! 

A herd of horses trotting along…

Postcard Viewer

Postcard viewer is an awesome photo gallery flash program.  I purchased a copy and modified the flash program to be more suited to my liking.  It causes some pixelation in my photos, but otherwise I think the program is a really cool way to display photos.  Here is an example:

http://www.jamescookphotography.com/postcard/georgetownAtNight/

Horse Of Course Class 1

Yesterday evening was my 1st class.  Wow, did I get a firehose full of information! Karen is incredibly knowledgeable about photographing and drawing horses. We talked about confirmation shots, how not to distort the horses features, various things that go into great shots, characteristics of breeds, parts of the horse, muscular system of horses, skeletal structure of horses, how to know when a horse is angry, history of horse racing, and many other aspects which I need to go back to my notes to remember. The 2 hour class went by extremely quickly and I really enjoyed it.  I have a ton of homework.  My homework includes:

• Studying breeds so I can recognize them
• Learning the parts of a horse (withers, chestnut, hock, etc…)
• Printing off some of the horse I shot at the festival of the horse and identifying their breeds
• look through some books she gave me
• and go out and take photographs some horses.

The 1st class was held at Artworks.  This class will consist of many field trips including horse farms, Keenland, and  Kentucky Horse Park.  I am so looking forward to going out and photographing horses!  I will blog about my experiences and photographs from each class. 

On the topic of identifying horses, I just got this picture in an email today from my friend Carl Pursel.  Now I know what a quarter horse is!

Picasa Collage Maker

I was just playing with Picasa’s collage maker.  It rocks.  Here is a sample image I made in less than a minute

 

No Luck On The Slots

Well, when I go to a casino, I only play the slots.  Well Vegas was unkind to me as this video will attest.

Slots Not Lucky For Me

 

Vegas Baby

Last week I was in Las Vegas.  What a spectacular place to take photographs. I can’t wait to go back and catch some of the awesome shows. Here are a few pictures from the week:

The Horse, Of Course

This week I signed up to take a class, The Horse, Of Course, which is provided by ArtWorks.  I took a portrait photography course from them and it was taught by two instructors Jami Henson, and Karen LaBach.  Karen is teaching The Horse Of Course, and while it is being offered for drawing students, it is suitable for photographers as well.  This will give me a good introduction into equine photography to see if I like it. I live in the heart of horse country so it seems silly for me not to learn how to properly photograph horses.   Here are a couple landscapes I took with horses in them.  I took them a couple of years ago.  Lets see if I can improve upon these in the weeks to come.

Melissa On TV!

Melissa was on the local television station today talking about Jazzercise.  Actually she was there with her friend and fellow Jazzercise owner Cindy McGeorge.  It is so funny to let Melissa tell the story but in essence Cindy and Melissa had things all planned out based on previous talks with the station.  However, once they were brought out of the “green room” during the commercial break right before their live segment, everything changed at the last minute and they only had like 1 minute to get their act together.  They did great adapting to the new agenda as you can see in the movie below.  Click on the image to see the quicktime movie that I recorded of their segment.

85MM F1.8

Got two new lenses today.  I am first going to talk about my Canon 85MM F1.8.   This is my first prime lens and I am in LUV!  Here is a shot at F1.8 to demonstrate the depth of field:

Notice how everything is blurry except for the end of the box it came in.  The lens on the table is my 16–35.

Now look at the gorgeous portrait shots I can take with this puppy!

I still need to work to get the hang of this lens, but so far, I think I am going to be shooting with this lens quite a bit!