Hadlow 2013 - Monty Roberts Tour

 

HADLOW

For me, its a strange time of year. I gauge the coming of the festive period and long winter nights by the arrival of Monty Roberts and the tour around the UK. This isn't a bad thing (the tour and festivities) as I enjoy filming Monty, and the horses that come to the demonstrations. The long winter nights I could do without.

Over the coming days and weeks, there will be a post on each of the tour dates, from my point of view as a camera man, and photographer.

The Hadlow venue is always a bit of a challenge for filming and photography. With it's dark surface and poor lighting the quality of the footage is always debatable. In an ideal world, I'd be carrying around with me a huge lighting rig that would flood the entire place with good even quality light. But, I don't!

It's a 'make do' situation.

My choice is limited in what I can do, with increasing the Gain on my video equipment, and increasing the ISO on my camera. Even shooting at 4000 ISO set to Aperture for the slow shots, and switching to Shutter priority for the fast movement, taking a hit on exposure, and fixing it on the computer, gives poor or mediocre shots. That's using my new D800 too!

There is also a level of randomness to the venue (there is another venue that wins that prize, but you'll have to wait for the blog on that one until the end of tour! The lighting isn't geared up for what I do. Its for riding horses! As long as you can see your horse, the jumps etc, you're OK.

This is Monty working with a horse and one of the Recommended Associates. The thing on top of the horse is a dummy rider, which quite usefully saves a real rider from going up on a horse that either has a problem or is new to riding.

Some of the sections of the evening can be quite easy to take pictures of for a few reasons. Partly, as I have been working with Monty so long in the UK, I get to pre-empt his next move with the horse.  So, sometimes you'll see me on the scaffold filming, and make a grab for my camera to take a select shot.

Monty worked hard with this horse, and the results went well. As you can see from the shot  below the result was Jake (the rider) being legged up onto the horse and the horse quietly letting Jake walk him around the pen. When the action is quite low energy, it affords me the ability to take a picture like the one below, little movement, high ISO, shallow aperture, and 1/50 second.