Summer Hiatus Over - Let's Get Back to Work

If there's one thing I don't like about living in the south, it's the heat. I get uncomfortable and sweat easily, and therefore, the first thing I'm likely to do when the temperatures start approaching 90 is get indoors! Therefore I've spent the last 2 months focusing and making improvements on my Real Estate Appraisal work and staying in the air conditioning any time not doing house inspections. It's ok though, for the time being, that's the profession that pays the bills and thusly deserves my greater attention.

It's also true that my stepson spent the better part of the last couple of months with us and much of my attention was diverted to family as well. While he was here, we made a point to go out for a weekend photo session and I'll share one of my favorite images from that session.


I did grow a sunflower though, just so I could photograph it!


However, I've enjoyed sharing my photographic efforts both here and on Flickr since starting this business, Beamcatchers, and this blog. It's time to get busy sharing again now that summer is winding down.

I haven't spent the whole summer totally indoors. At a minimum, I continued coverage of the horse shows at the Double T Farms. As I told Julie last month while riding out there for a show, I've reached the point where I owe every one of those young people a little dedication and continuity even if I don't sell a single picture. They enjoy and look forward to seeing the images, and the last thing I want to do is disappoint them.

The July show was held on July 19, 2008 at Double T Farms here in Pasquotank County. I'll simply be discussing the July show in this post; however, you can view images from any of the shows in my portfolio over at Zenfolio. It was the first night show of the season and not without it's challenges once the sun faded over the horizon. The arena is well lit, but even so, it wasn't clear to me initially whether I would be able push up the ISO and correct for the lighting or have to use flash. I tried a little of everything in my bag of tricks. It became apparent fairly quickly flash was the only way to go, but I made the one critical mistake I knew better than to make. But I made it anyway in my haste to salvage something from the evening. I put the flash on the camera! You guessed it, ghostly glowing eyes and horrible ugly shadows in many of the images. It wasn't a complete flop however as there were still some interesting resulting photographs.


The early part of the day was successful. Even though the heat was blistering (well, to me anyway), I made every attempt to keep moving around the arena, moving the vantage point and backgrounds to achieve different looks for my viewers.

Sometimes even dust provides you with an interesting background!


Overall, I felt it worked rather well and I was pleased with the results, and when you can find a photographer that's reasonably satisfied with his own work after looking at it twice, that's pretty good! As a general rule, we photographers are indeed our greatest critics.

Next post we'll take a look at a few of the images from the August 2008 Double T Farms horse show.

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