Green Valleys in Spring

The hills of South Australia have a seasonal range of colour values, from a green so rich you’d think it was Ireland, in the wet months, to their characteristic yellow-grey in the harshest summer months. Depending on elevation and what sort of season we get, their nature can vary a lot at the same time of year. This is the stud farm at Hope Valley, in the southern hills, photographed on October 9^th, 2022, one of our three consecutive La Nina years. The landscape is still appreciably lush, though spring is well matured and what should be the hot weather is just around the corner. But in these times of strange weather patterns there seem no hard and fast rules any more. This is a medium telephoto shot, framing up the horses in their paddocks against the house on the hill for a very picturesque composition. Contrast, colour and sharpness were adjusted slightly. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

 

Stop-Action at the Gallop

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This is another shot from the Gumeracha Medieval Fair in May, 2009. I was shooting on the camera's 'sport' setting, which optimises exposure time as short as possible. Capturing a horse in full gallop, unblurred and with excellent tonal qualities, is a good result. Shooting into the sun quadrant would also have driven the shutter speed up, and the chip has compensated to render pleasing mid-tones in a situation which would have favoured hard contrast in the days of chemical photography. Sharpness and colour were tweaked slightly. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.

Chivalry in the Hills

This is another frame from the Medieval Fair at Gumeracha in the Adelaide Hills in early May 2009, one of The King's Horses demonstrating ancient equestrian skills and the great Middle Ages sport of jousting. The field set aside for galloping at eachother with sharp objects was at the foot of a steep hill over which the sun was sinking in the afternoon, creating an amazing lighting situation as the viewing area was on the east side. Thus the dark background of hillside in shade, but full backlight on the subjects, resulting in various lensflare effects due both to shooting into the sun quadrant and reflections from polished metal. This frame is medium telephoto and automatic exposure, with the sport setting selected for fastest possible shutter speed. Sharpened and colour-enhanced only; Fuji FinePix S5600. Image by Mike.

Ponies on a winter's afternoon

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On the road to Victor Harbour (South Australia) you'll pass many horse properties and not a few breeders. One of the most interesting and unusual sights is the dales ponies grazing in paddocks along the highway -- small, incredibly hardy ponies which are at home in the merciless winters of the northern hemisphere. Their winter coats grow in shaggy, to protect them from cold, wind, frost and snow ... although in Australia they won't have to endure much of that! This picture was oddly difficult to capture. The lighting conditions were deeply overcast on this winter's day, and the raw image was flat, murky, absolutely colorless. To get this result, I've used software to "tweak" the brightness and contrast, resaturate the color, and also sharpen the overall frame. To get good results on the darker pony, technically, I've tweaked the contrast too far: notice that the face of the white pony, and the rock, are actually burned out. To render this image fully "publication quality," I'd need to go in and correct those areas, adding color and detail from the original (flat!) image. But it's still a very nice picture as it stands, so -- here it is. Photo by Jade, 2006.

The Lighthorseman

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The Lighthorseman is one of many war memorials around Adelaide -- and one of the better known ones. More than any other memorial, this statue recalls and honors Australia's cavalry tradition, which is quite the equivalent of that celebrated by the United States. (There's actually another memorial, about a half mile away, on the corner of the Adelaide parklands, where green fields stretch away from the city: it's a plain, solid stone horse trough, and it's the memorial to the horses who served, and died -- it's not so well-known, nor so photogenic, but that's the one which brings a lump to the throat of horse-lovers, like myself.) This image was very difficult to capture, because of the sun angle: the challenge was to get detail from the soldier's face to appear, at the same time as correctly exposing the rest of the shot. The photo was then cropped and sized -- you may not realize there's a set of traffic lights just out of frame at bottom left! And quite a lot of enhancement was done at the software stage, to make the most of this dramatic picture. Photo by Mel, 2007.

Natural Backlight

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Sometimes a great shot just walks into your lens: this was a shot begging to be taken. A cool, sunny Sunday afternoon in Greenwich Park, east London, with the low sun of early December (2007) backlighting the trees in their rich colours. The mounted Police were on patrol and I waited for pedestrians to clear the frame, lined up a patch of sunshine, cranked in plenty of optical zoon and let the horses walk into my viewfinder. The shadows flow directly toward the viewer while the sun makes the yellow leaves shine as if luminous. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Photo by Mike.

Just a stroll across the causeway

Here's a sight you would once have seen every hour of every day, but now you have to travel a long way to find. Clydesdales ... heavy horses ... shire horses ... working in harness. These days they're usually display teams, such as Mike Keogh's famous Cooper's Clydesdales, which perform at all kinds of shows; but the horse above, Skye, is one of eight or ten draught horses which take turns pulling the tram across the causeway between Victor Harbour and Granite Island. They're a wonderful sight. It's a short trip (you can hike it easily yourself in ten or fifteen minutes), and these horses work in something like two-hour shifts. It's amazing to watch them just lean casually into the harness and stroll away, as if the tram doesn't even exist! These horses are pets ... groomed, coddled, petted, cherished -- and they know it. Some of them are "showmen," who toss their heads and strut for their audience! Notice Skye's brand new shoes. The camera was one of the Fujis; the day was actually a little overcast and quite cold, and this picture has been enhanced to make it appear as a sunny day! Photo by Jade, 2007.