> I have recently updated and added quite a few equestrian related
> photos to: http://home.ca.inter.net/brooksdj
> Comments are welcomed,skin is thick these days<g>
thick, eh? we'll see <g>
Overall, nice photos. I tried my hand at equestrian stuff not too long ago; it
was interesting. It took a few missed shots to get the timing part down, but
that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be (I guess the movement is quite
predictable, deterministic in fact, and they're not going as fast as I thought
they would). On about 2 jumps, I also tried to exploit the 2.5 fps rate of the
MZ-S just outta curiousity, and I gotta say: That approach seems like a waste
of time and film. It clearly didn't stack up at all (for me) to the "one shot
with good timing" approach.
Overall, the hardest part was positioning myself so that my backgrounds were as
nice as possible, and not particularly cluttered. I'm guessing that's a
challenge in general if your not an "official photog" for the event. I got
lucky since the course I was on was particularly spacious, but judging from the
photos, it seems like this would be quite difficult at the courses you frequent.
Of them all, I like the "Palgrave Schooling Class" gallery the most; probably
due to a bit more variety of shots in that one. Along those lines, IN THEORY
(i.e., "I could be wrong, but...") it seems like it would be a neat thing to
get more shots of some of the other stuff that happens around the track. When I
was there, that was some of the stuff that caught my eye the most. Like
preparation of the horses, etc. I caught a few down-time quiet moments between
horse and jockey that seemed pretty intimate and added a totally different feel
to the picture set (which was less than a roll, and honestly not good enough to
show off anywhere). If I was to shoot it again, I think that may be something
I'd pay more attention to in order to break the monotony of all the see-the-
horsey-jump photos I got.
As for the website overall, it would help a lot if you added some navigation
buttons to each of the galleries. Once I click on a gallery and go thru all of
the photos. There's no easy way to get back to the main page to select another
gallery. (Aside from re-entering the original URL), my only option is to hit
the back button a bunch of times, which means that I have to go thru the same
photos all over again before returning to start. Get what I mean? You already
have navigation in most other places, so that's hopefully a pretty trivial (but
nice) modification.
I guess the other option is to have another window open when a visitor clicks
on the gallery. But that's way over my head in terms of the how-to's.
Oh yeah! none of the other (no horsey) gallery links worked for me... but I'm
guessing you know that already. Hope that was helpful.
How's that skin holding up? :o)
- jerome
