“Are We Having Fun Yet?” – I love this photo of Salvador Alvarado and CCF Hibiscus Coast hanging out before a class. It really captures the adrenalin and action of horse show competition, dontcha think?
March 14, 2020
Originally the title of this post just referred to the fact that the big hunter-jumper circuits that take place every winter in the warm southern states were winding down, and so was my focus on equine-themed photography. I attended a few shows in Thermal, California, and in my own home town of Tucson, Arizona, photographing my own horses and my own daughter who is a professional rider/trainer/coach based near San Diego, and I was prepping to share some of the fun and action captured by my camera.
But now, of course, the season really is over! Along with multiple other sporting events, horse shows are canceling competitions for at least the next 30 days. Included in those many casualties coast to coast is the FEI World Cup that was coming to Las Vegas in April.
As originally planned, I am sharing some of those show jumping images I captured last month. And then I think the focus going forward is going to be Vicarious Travel – as in, since I’m staying close to home and won’t be traveling for the foreseeable future, it’s time to dig into those photo files and see what treasures I can find and share from previous adventures. I also have closet-cleaning and file organization on my activity schedule!
So enjoy a little distraction from the gloomy state of the world. I promise my emails and slideshows are germ free, although I wouldn’t mind if they went viral;-)
PS – I’m getting ready to offer some print giveaways over on Facebook. Be sure to Like my page so you don’t miss out!
As I photographer I wear two hats. First, I love to travel in pursuit of scenic nature and wildlife subjects. I’ve ventured far afield with my camera gear by automobile, airplane, and boat, from the South Pacific to the Arctic to Africa, from desert vistas to underwater realms. I have struggled to come up with a simple label that could summarize the variety of my subject matter, until recently a mentor suggested Wanderlust and Wildlife. Perfect!
And second, I am a lifelong horse person. My mother was a horsewoman, I grew up with horses, and I currently have a farm with about twenty equine residents. I raise a couple of foals each year and provide a retirement home for some old-timers. And my daughter Michelle is continuing the family legacy in her professional career as a trainer, rider, and coach of show jumpers.
That’s me in a photo taken many decades ago in Nogales, Arizona, riding my mom’s thoroughbred mare Wait For Me.
So when I attend the horse shows to watch Michelle ride and cheer on my young horses, I wear my other hat and am known around the barn as Photographer Mom. That moniker may have to expand, because my granddaughter is showing similar symptoms of a serious horse passion. Do I really want to be called Photographer Grandma?
All of which is a lengthy introduction to my first blog of 2020 – a collection of equine images created during the big Desert Circuit in Thermal, California. First of all, I am going to reveal a dark secret. I am not one of those photographers who ‘captures it in camera’. For me, my images are the RAW material (double entendre for any serious photogs reading this) from which I draw creative inspiration. I’ve decided to adopt the phrase Art From Photography as my mantra.
To illustrate, I’m going to share the transformation of an image as it progresses from 1: Straight out of camera 2: Quick crop and edit 3: More aggressive crop and edit, and finally 4: In-depth photo processing (yes, Photoshop) to create my own artistic interpretation of the scene. Here’s a photo that is an extreme example of that workflow.
Because I am shooting from outside the show arena, most of the jumps are pretty far away, especially in Thermal where the Grand Prix field is enormous. This calls for a powerful zoom lens but, even so, sometimes the distances are pretty extreme. This shot was taken as sort of a throwaway effort. I was set up to shoot some big oxers close by the rail, so that I could fill my camera frame. But as long as I was there, why not aim at a few of the more distant jumps just for the heck of it.
Here is the original photo, straight out of the camera. Taken from far away with a 100-400mm zoom lens (because I forgot to switch to the 200-600mm), underexposed, and crooked! I’m embarrassed to share it with you.
Here it is with a quick touch-up. Cropped, straightened, and some quick exposure adjustments. Often I do this on the showgrounds by exporting the image from my camera to my iPhone and tweaking it there to make it presentable for a quick share.
Here it is with more careful post-processing once I am home on my computer with my digital darkroom tools at hand.
And here’s the final creation, courtesy of Photoshop, art filters, and a heavy dose of artistic license.
I titled this image “XOXO”. I love the unique style of this horse, crossing his hind feet to stay clear of the jump. Even better, his crossed ankles are repeated in the criss-crossed jump standards in the background.
And this is a good time to give a shout-out to the professional horse show photographers who shoot every single horse that enters the ring, all day, every day. They run back and forth umpteen times from vantage point #1 to vantage point #2 for each and every round. They kneel, stand up and kneel again, over and over (my aging knees barely withstand even one crouch and recover). And there is no way they have the time to post-process the hundreds of photographs they take each and every day during a show. They really do have to get it right ‘straight out of the camera’, whereas I have the luxury of following around a handful of horse/rider combinations, taking multiple shots of each through the week, then culling out the bad and zeroing in on the good. Which is a labor of love because I truly enjoy the creative process involved.
And I enjoy sharing the results with you. Here are a few keepers from last week at the show. Not all resulted from such dramatically challenging origins, but now you know my deepest, darkest secret!
Happy 2020 to you all! I can’t thank you enough for all your enthusiasm and support. It means the world to me and keeps me motivated.
Tomorrow we ring in not only the New Year but a new decade. I’m looking forward to new adventures, photographic and otherwise. January will start off with equestrian competitions on the West Coast. We anticipate some boating adventures throughout the year from our floating base in Dana Point, California. And I’ve already booked a June photo workshop in Scotland with Denise Ippolito to photograph seabirds (puffins and gannets), and another trip with Denise to Bosque del Apache next November for the amazing migrating sandhill cranes and snow geese. Who knows what other interesting subjects will find their way in front of my lens!
But on this last day of 2019, here’s a bit of nostalgia – presenting my Top 25 Most-Liked Photos from social media for the year. Click your way through each captioned image to view in high resolution and to read more about it.
Thank you again for your interest and participation. I look forward to sharing much more with you this coming year.
The holiday season always catches Southern Arizona residents by surprise. In October we are just starting to enjoy temps reliably not in the triple digits. We’re still wearing shorts and basking in balmy warm sunshine while much of the country is getting its first dusting of snow, if not a blizzard or two. By Thanksgiving we might get our first frost, and then suddenly Christmas is upon us and we are not emotionally ready for the transition!
My favorite trees, the cottonwoods, seem to share this attitude. They cling to their fall foliage well into December or even January. Finally a winter windstorm will blow the last clinging leaves away, but by early February their crowns start to shimmer green as new leaves sprout, months before any other native tree species.
But as desert dwellers we treasure the rare moisture that the winter storms bring. Wildflowers germinate, forecasting a colorful spring. The usually dry riverbeds begin to flow, fed first by the rain and then maintained with snowmelt from the mountains. Cacti and deep-rooted mesquite store up enough water to get them through the dry, hot summer to come.
Most of the images in this collection were taken last New Year’s Day. A winter storm had blanketed the Tucson valley with heavy clouds. It was a gloomy grey day and the mountains were hidden away from view. I had a new 400mm prime lens I was itching to try out. I kept peering out the windows, hoping for a ray of sunshine. Finally the clouds began to lift just as the sun started to set, briefly lighting up the newly snow-covered peaks with shades of rose and magenta before nightfall turned all to grey again.
Click to view this week’s featured gallery Desert In Winter. This is a secret gallery, visible only by following this link, that I am sharing especially for my readers and supporters.
Last August my husband Mike and I made a lengthy road trip (read about it here) from Arizona to Wyoming to view the total solar eclipse. On our way home we chose a route that took us through the spectacular red rock country of Utah and Northern Arizona. This is a vast and stunning region of arches, towering buttes, red rock canyons and forested plateaus. Glympses of thousands of years of history can still be appreciated in the remnants of cliff dwellings, historic hogans, and rock art. Petroglyphs dating as far back as 13,000 years actually depict images of mastodons.
As we approached Monument Valley in the vicinity of Mexican Hat, Utah, (that’s a town, as well as a rock formation) the scenery was so captivating that every 100 yards or so I was begging Mike (who was driving) to pull off the highway so I could photograph another beautiful vista. It was monsoon season and the skies were dramatic as well. Dust devils were spinning across the desert floor, while virga clouds adopted the colors of a sunset sky, creating pink rain.
Fast forward nine months to when the opportunity arose to join a night photography workshop in Valley of the Gods, another astoundingly scenic valley not far from Monument Valley, I signed up immediately and even talked Mike into joining me just for the opportunity to enjoy night skies free of light pollution.
We stayed in the tiny town of Bluff, Utah – population 258! But the town has turned into a destination for artists and has much to offer; a wonderful hotel, several excellent restaurants, trading posts and galleries featuring beautiful Navajo art. A historic fort is open to visitors for free, and tells the fascinating story of Bluff’s founding in the late 1800s by the determined Hole in the Rock Mormon pioneers who literally carved out a trail through impassable terrain to first settle the area.
Bluff is the perfect basecamp from which to launch explorations of the many unique destinations in the area. Float trips down the San Juan River start in nearby Sand Island Recreation Area. The 17-Mile dirt road that loops through Valley of the Gods is just minutes away, as is Goosenecks State Park where the meandering river has carved a winding double loop canyon 1,000 feet deep with steeply terraced walls that reveal 300 million years of geological history. Less than an hour’s drive south is the approach to Monument Valley. Moab and Natural Bridges Monument is nearby. And Bluff is the gateway to scenic and historic Bears Ears National Monument, culturally significant to multiple Native American tribes, and now sadly being decimated by the current administration in favor of mining and drilling.
Night photography is necessarily related to sleep deprivation. Each night we headed out around 10 or 11 pm depending on our destination, and we stumbled back to our hotel room beds somewhere around 4 a.m. But when actually out in the field under the vast starlit sky, coping with cameras and tripods in the dark on rough ground, the adrenalin kicked in and the hours passed in a blur. A few hours of sleep were refreshing enough to tackle the computer and the necessary post-processing to make the technically challenging images come to life.
And without further ado, I invite you to enjoy my gallery of Red Rock images. These will be uploaded to my online store in the future, but for now this gallery is for your viewing pleasure only.
Click HERE or on the photo to open Gallery Slideshow
Every winter, horse show participants make the trek with their four-legged partners to warm weather climes where huge hunter/jumper circuits run for months on end. Instead of suffering through record snowfall and freezing temps, they choose balmy sunshine in states like Florida, California, and Arizona. Literally tens of thousands of equestrians and support personnel make the journey each and every winter season.
My daughter Michelle is a professional rider and trainer based in California, so she participates in this mass migration, in her case to the Palm Springs area where the HITS Coachella Circuit starts in mid-January and continues into mid-March. HITS, not so coincidentally, is short for Horse Shows in The Sun!
I try to attend a week or two here or there, both to cheer on my daughter and also because some of the horses she rides belong to our jointly owned Cross Creek Farms! I breed and raise the babies here in Tucson, and when they are old enough they travel to California and learn their trade as hunters and jumpers.
It’s a great environment for an avid photographer, with all the color and action of showjumping. I’ve earned the nickname ‘Photographer Mom’ from my daughter, as I follow her and her students from ring to ring to record their rounds.
The photograph featured here is of a young Holsteiner stallion named Lutalo that Michelle bred and raised. It’s easy to take a beautiful image of a beautiful horse but the background of a horse show can be distracting. I put in quite a few hours today applying some digital magic to the original photo to create a fine art image that I’m pleased to add to my portfolio. There is a quality I look for in my photography, something I refer to as gesture, that expresses the essence of the subject matter. Here gesture is expressed in the direct eye contact, elegantly curved neck, perfect braids, and the warmth of color in the leather rein.
Of course the total solar eclipse in August was on our bucket list! I elected not to attempt to photograph the main event – that’s a technical challenge better left to more accomplished photographers than I. Considering this once-in-a-lifetime experience of 100% totality would only last 2 1/2 minutes max, I really wanted to absorb the experience without fiddling with camera settings.
But the eclipse was a good excuse to embark on an epic road trip through the Southwest, affording me an opportunity to record some spectacular scenery. From Tucson we drove through the Salt River Canyon up to the White Mountains, and from there traveled through the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert en route to Gallup, New Mexico. I was booking our lodging on the fly, utilizing TripAdvisor on my iPhone en route, and our first night out we stumbled across an unexpectedly wonderful historic hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, on the old Route 66 but just a stone’s throw from the Interstate. Back in the 30s and 40s all the movie stars (John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Ronald Reagan to name a few) stayed at El Rancho Hotel. Our room for the night was named after Lee Remick. The ambience and nostalgic memorabilia were a treat to experience.
From Gallup we headed to Santa Fe, detouring to explore the cliff dwellings and petroglyphs of El Morro and Bandolier National Monuments. Santa Fe is always fabulous and we spent an extra day there, visiting a friend and enjoying a superb dinner at one of the town’s finest restaurants. Then on to Taos, followed by a long stretch of highway to our final destination in North Platte, Nebraska, where we joined an international group of eclipse watchers for the big event. Except – having arrived, the weather turned sour, with cloud cover forecast over the entire state of Nebraska on the day of the eclipse. With looming grey skies as well as predictions of massive traffic jams, Mike and I did a quick regroup and abandoned our tour after one day and headed west towards clearer skies forecast for Wyoming.
We drove some 500 plus miles that day and of course there was not a prayer of booking a last minute hotel room within 100 miles of the path of totality! Instead we found a sod farm that was offering overnight parking on the perimeter of their beautiful green grass. The main selling point was the row of porta-potties installed for the convenience of their guests. So for $100 we parked our Jeep by the field, spent $20 more for hamburgers from the grill, and then we settled into the front seat with pillows and blankets picked up at a local Walmart, and spent the night in the car.
Next morning we headed off at dawn to Glendo State Park in Wyoming where we connected with a group from the University of Arizona’s Space Grant Program, associates of Mike’s from work. They were participating in a balloon based experiment and were set up in a prime campsite within the park. Our friends met us at the entrance of the by now crowded park and ferried us in – enabling us to enjoy a spectacular and unobstructed view of the eclipse in 100% totality. Exiting the park at the end of the day was another story – it took nearly 3 hours to drive 3 miles back to the entrance. From there the Interstate 25 was crawling with traffic back to Denver, but fortunately we were headed in the opposite direction. We overnighted in Casper, Wyoming, where a room at the Days Inn cost more $$$$ than a night at a luxury hotel in Santa Fe had cost us the week before!
Heading home from Wyoming we took our time through the spectacular red rock country on the border of Utah and Arizona. Looking at the amazing colors and layers of the landscape, it is easy to see how Native American designs in pottery and blankets were inspired by the geology of this part of the country. Poor Mike, who was driving, was constantly being ordered to pull over to the side of the road so I could photograph another epic scene.
We spent a couple of nights in Monument Valley, first at Gouldings, another historic hotel with ties to the movie industry, and then at a fabulous modern hotel named The View, operated by the Navajo Nation, with every room offering a balcony and unobstructed view of Monument Valley in all its vast glory. We hired a Navajo guide to take us out for both a sunrise photography tour as well as a starlight tour of the park. My night photography results weren’t as consistent as in Maine and I only got a couple of shots that satisfied me – it’s really hard to lock critical focus on a distant star in the dark with aging eyesight! But I love the one shot that I did manage to pull off – and, again, spending hours under the starlit skies with only nature for company was well worth the experience.
From there it was straight home, a surprisingly quick 6 hour drive. We immediately went on a spree of binge-watching a trilogy of old John Wayne movies filmed in the red rock country of Monument Valley. I’m already making plans to return in 2018.
I recently added a new collection of star-studded (literally) images to my portfolio, captured during a workshop in Maine’s Acadia National Park. The workshop focused on night photography, in particular the Milky Way. Did you know the Milky Way has a season? Here in the Northern Hemisphere its brilliant core, containing some 84 million stars, drops below the horizon in November and doesn’t appear again until next spring. Of course the workshop last June was orchestrated for peak viewing – and photographing – the glowing heart of our galaxy in all its splendor.
I’m not an especially accomplished night photographer but, with expert assistance from the group leaders, I came away with a collection of Milky Way images that I’m proud to add to my portfolio. The technique I was using to capture my shots required eleven minutes of in-camera processing per image – allowing me plenty of time to absorb the summer night air, the soothing rhythm of waves lapping the shore, and the sparkling infinity of stars overhead that we rarely see through the light pollution of civilization.
I added a new word to my vocabulary as well – airglow. Wikipedia defines airglow as “a faint emission of light by a planetary atmosphere.” Even in the dark of night, the sky may glow with softly luminous shades of green and magenta. With its sensitive electronics, combined with the long exposures needed for night photography, a camera is able to reveal more stars and more airglow than the naked human eye can see, making the results of night photography particularly satisfying. Those long exposures reveal the soft colors of airglow on the horizon and simultaneously transform the constant motion of the ocean and surf into an ethereal mist. The resulting images radiate with a magical light that shimmers between earth and sky.
My sister Patty and I had booked this Hawaiian photography workshop well in advance, but right after the holidays I came down with a nasty bronchitis and a simultaneous knee injury. I was limping and coughing, generally feeling so under the weather that on the day before departure I was making plans to cancel. Luckily I realized at the last minute my symptoms had bottomed out and I was (barely) on the mend. Although certainly not at my best during the trip, I’m so glad I didn’t pass it up!
On Kauai the focus was on seascapes and beach scenes, where I concentrated on slow shutter technique that gives the waves and water a pleasing sense of motion while freezing the background into place. We started on the placid shores of Hanalei Bay near Princeville, before traveling to more distant beaches, each uniquely characterized by sand and lava rock. At Queen’s Bath a secluded tide pool fills and drains with the incoming wave action. Rogue waves have killed more than a few adventurers there, especially during the winter months when the sea is rough. We kept a safe distance but some more adventurous types were diving into the pool, giving our scenic shots a touch of human interest. On another day, a doors-off helicopter ride over the dramatic highland scenery of Waimea Canyon and the Napali coastline and cliffs provided a jolt of adrenalin along with dramatic aerial views.
The weeklong workshop ended with a side trip to the Big Island of Hawaii, where Kilauea Volcano dominates the landscape. Without a doubt, the highlight of the entire trip was a before-dawn boat trip to the Kamokuna coast, where a spectacular “waterfall” of lava from Kilauea was pouring into the ocean, creating a storm of fire and steam. Our captain maneuvered the boat close enough to the chaos that we could feel the heat and see floating chunks of hot lava sizzle in the water as they bumped against the boat’s aluminum hull. Hawaiian legend says that where lava meets sea, Pele the volcano goddess battles with her sister Namakaokahai, goddess of the ocean. This spectacular firehose of flowing lava had only appeared a few weeks earlier, on December 31, 2016, when several acres of built up volcanic delta collapsed unexpectedly into the sea, opening the lava tube. No one knew when it might suddenly close up again – making this opportunity exceedingly special.
Here’s another favorite from last week’s exploration of Sabino Creek with the water flowing, mist rising in the chill morning air, and rays of light beaming through the naked branches of the sycamores. I have so many winter portraits of bare-branched trees that I call them my ‘Dead Tree Collection’. There is a rhythm and poetry to the silhouette of bare branches against the sky, uplifted and graceful almost like dancers.
I did pay the price however. I have succumbed to some version of winter crud so, as I cough, blow my nose, and guzzle medicine, I’m keeping this post mercifully brief.
As I photographer I wear two hats. First, I love to travel in pursuit of scenic nature and wildlife subjects. I’ve ventured far afield with my camera gear by automobile, airplane, and boat, from the South Pacific to the Arctic to Africa, from desert vistas to underwater realms. I have struggled to come up with a simple label that could summarize the variety of my subject matter, until recently a mentor suggested Wanderlust and Wildlife. Perfect!
