Monday, August 6, 2012

2012 Summer Olympics: Equestrian Jumping (Another favorite event for me)

On Saturday, I was really happy to have time to head over to the Equestrian venue at Greenwich Park to shoot the Horse Jumping event. This turned out to be an amazing venue with beautiful horses, amazing colors, and a really cool design of the course.


I shot many of the different gates, but I liked this one the best because it incorporated the Olympic rings. (For those of you who might have missed my reasoning in other posts, this helps tell the story, so that one someone sees this image in the years to come, they will know that this jump was at the Olympics.)



The riders and horses are amazing. (FYI - that amazing building in the background was being used a the press room - by far the nicest press room of any venue!)




Legs tucked in and clearing the gate...



After shooting a lot of images and knowing that I got a bunch of "safe shots" I started slowing the shutter and doing motion blur shots.


And, of course, as soon as I start doing motion blur, this rider takes a hard spill right in front of me. (At this point, I wish that I was shooting at 1/1500 sec to freeze the action, but what can you do?)


Ouch!



An amazing background for this venue.


They did an amazing job with all of the colors and gate designs. I shot this image to highlight the colors of the flowers.


By moving position, I was able to shoot this jump from more of a straight-on position. I moved slightly to the left of the jump to offset the two sets of Olympic rings.



I saw this little girl in the stands and just had to take her photo (and send it to the family). Too cute!



Jumping over Stonehenge. Love that touch.


After shooting all of the images, and being pretty tired, I almost left the venue without taking a wide shot. But I decided that I couldn't miss this shot, so I went back to the press room, grabbed some wide lenses and headed back out to the venue and up to the top of the bleachers. It was well worth the effort! (The buildings in the background are in an area called Canary Wharf, which is where I have been living for the last couple of weeks.)

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