This cowgirl lifestyle advertising image was shot in Glendo, Wyoming in summer 2000, while the last light was dropping behind the hills. I used a slow shutter speed and tracked the rider and horse as they moved across the the terrain to keep the rider recognizable, as best as I could.
The yellow fields were in late sunlight, the deep blue sky, and the speed of the horse all came together naturally. Years of shooting commercial motion and still campaigns taught me when to stop overshooting a scene.
The frames were difficult to shoot as I had to track the rider/horse left to right, and back plus not move the camera up or down nor rotate the camera. This was even more difficult as this was a film shoot so I did not have any way to check exposure, movement, see how much or little blur I had.
What I did was to shout at Kenda to go, I told her where to stop. After her riding the horse hard I would tell her to ride back in the opposite direction at speed, but only until the horse got its respiratory back. More about this below.
The camera I had at the time could shoot about 5½ frames a second. Meaning I would go through a 36 exposure roll of film after 2 runs. I remember shooting about 8 to 10 rolls as I adjusted the shutter speed to get more and less blur. And we shot as fast as the horse would allow.
Most photographers who are not "Cowboy or action equine" photographers do not think about the horse, they just want to shoot continuously. This can happen if the horse is in peak form, but even then, the horse is not a machine. When a horse starts to tire, like humans, their legs get wobbly. When that happens a horse can stumble, or worse, fall dumping the rider on the ground, all this with the potential of injury or death. This would be bad.
I avoid this by telling the rider to turn and go only when they think the horse is ready. So far, I have not been part of getting any one, or horses, hurt.
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More images from the same shoot below.
In the photo below you can get an idea of how much motion is involved in shooting this.
In looking at the tree leaves, note they are layered streaks. Shows a lot of camera motion on the photographer's end.
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I would stay in southern Arizona for 3-4 months during the winter and shoot. A cowboy buddy and I would go out at every sun set, every sunrise and wind up shooting 1 to 5 rolls each time. No use in shooting in less than ideal conditions.
There is zero artificial intelligence used in this image. I used the old fashion AI... Actual Intelligence.
Emotions: Confidence, freedom, movement, speed, solitude, grit, independence, focus, escape, strength, determination, quiet, motion, rugged, cinematic, openness
The Gear:
Canon camera using 100 ISO Fuji Sensia II film with an 85mm Canon lens at f1.7. This is my best guess as this was shot on film, meaning no automatic recording of the settings... plus I shot this on June 11, 2000. So a good while ago.
The Light:
Sunset. I got lucky on this. The sun was setting and there was a massive cloud which shaded the background to allow the sky to be blue. The grass was yellowish due to a lack of rain.
Another image below.
I processed the film by "Hand" using a Jobo. On my normal cowboy projects I would return with about 275-300 rolls of exposed 35mm film. Most of the film was Fuji Sensia II 100 ISO, with a few rolls of Ektachrome 64 ISO and an occational roll of Venvia which was 50 ISO, very saturated and had more contrast.
One big advantage of film cameras was, by comparason to digital cameras, the cameras were only $600 or $$700 for a new camera. When I shot film I had 6 cameras plus another special Canon camera that had a Poloroid back. There was a block of fiber optcis that transmitted the light from the film plane to the Poloroid film. The proceedure was to remove the back of the camera, and cut a hole in it, where the film plane was, allowing the camera using this back to work perfectly. Of course you were looking at a very small image, but it was a big deal to me.
Why 6 cameras? I had 5 lenses I "Normally" used. So I could have 5 cameras with the same film in my camera bag. So I could move quickly without changing lenses, in a frequently dusty enviroment just by putting one camera down ans picking up another with the lens I wanted.
The 6th camera body was just that, a body without out a lens, why? So I could take a lens off the put it on the 6th body that had B&W film in it. Kodak Plus-X Pan, which is a medium-speed ISO 125 film. I would use ISO 64, meaning I was overexposing the film by 1 stop then I would under develop the film by 1 stop. Why? By using this I would have a negative that had very wide tonal range that I wanted because the skin tones were fabulous. Another trick I did to limit the grain, was to bump up the developer temperature by 2 degrees. This meant the time the film was in the developer was shortened. The longer the film was in water, the grain would swell larger..
I got much better results processing the film vs. having it processed commercially, even when using processing labs that were busy. The reason is commercial labs will keep using the same chemistry by using "Replenisher chemicals", which theoretically was as good as new chemicals. The reasons to me are some inconsistency in the replenishment, oxidation and evaporation that all labs experienced
That was not true. It was close, but clearly inferior even in causal examination.
I would process one batch of several rolls at a time, process a second batch but extend the development by 30 seconds, or so. Then I'd pour all the chemicals out and mix up another batch. Then process the next etc.
The difference in color and contrast was surprisingly superior.
What "+1" meant was to process this image for a longer time in the developer as it was one stop underexposed.
We are based in Atlanta, Georgia, Los Angeles, California, both in the USA, & Milan, Italy, and serve the nation and travel worldwide for projects, both video and stills. On average we travel 175 days a year from all over the USA, to Singapore to Japan, Europe and the Middle East. We are normally in Europe 2 or 3 times a year, mostly Italy and Germany, shooting for clients there.
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