Getting ready for CORHA

It has come around to that time of the year again, and I am so excited to be preparing for CORHA, the Central Ohio Reining Horse Association, horse shows.  These are some of the premier Reining horses and riders in the midwest.  The action is fast, the horses are beautiful and the people are just great to be around!

I don't take this event lightly.  There is one show per month, from May through August, and it is an entire weekend full of classes.  Our Pure Energy Photography team delivers not only the photography but also the videography for each run.  This allows the judges the ability to review any run if there is a question about the score.  We have a full setup that allows the riders to complete their run and as they come out of the ring they can walk over to our table and see their run immediately.

This takes a full team of people from still photographers to videographers as well as people to man the tables.  Each person on our team are incredible.  We all pitch in to get our video stand set up, our table viewing area set up and prepare everything for the weekend.  This takes hours, blood, sweat and tears (sometimes) to accomplish, but the end result is definitely worth it.

I will do some additional posts this summer to detail some of the specific areas on this project and maybe even do some BTS (Behind the Scenes) videos to show you how some of it is put together.  Feel free to checkout our Youtube channel and our website to see some of the pictures.  I better get some sleep now, because in a month I will be so excited I won't be able to.

Check out our youtube channel and subscribe to keep up with new video posts:
http://www.youtube.com/pureenergyphoto

Also, check out our website and check out the pictures in the Central Ohio Reining Horse Assoc folder.
http://www.PureEnergyPhotography.com

I LOVE birthday parties!!

We were at my niece and nephew's birthday party and I was able to capture my daughter with my niece as they were singing happy birthday.

I love trying to capture a low light picture with the candles glow on the kids faces.  I learned that it is an extremely hard picture to capture.  It is low light and of course the kids are singing and moving, so you can't have a long shutter speed or everything will be blurry, but too short of a shutter speed and you get nothing but a candle flame and no faces. 

Most of the time your camera will pop up the flash and it will blow out the picture including that nice warm candle light.  You will be able to see all of the faces and usually it will be a sharp focus, but just my opinion I think you lose the mood with that.  I am definitely not saying that using a flash for taking pictures like this is bad, just my 2 cents. 

I hope that you will try to capture a low light birthday cake sometime.  It is definitely harder than I thought, but worth the effort.  I am going to keep working on those low light pictures to see if I can get better pictures without using the flash.

Cool lighting in Chicago

When I was in Chicago last month I went to a bar called the Scout.  It was happening, the Bears were playing and the drinks were flowing.  There had to be a ton of tv's and they even had a DJ. It was cool when the game was on the DJ would play music during the commercials and switch back over to the game once the commercials were over.

The food was really good too!  They had all of the normal bar fare with nachos and wings, but they also had foot long toasted cheese sandwiches.  It was really good but it was so rich I couldn't finish the whole thing. 

One of the most interesting parts of the whole scene was behind the bar.  The bar tenders were amazing, great smiles and good service.  The lighting of the bottles behind them is really what caught my eye.  The green lighting and the clear liquors was a great combination.  I hope that you like the picture.  Wish I would have had my good camera not just my camera phone.  However, with a little help from Snapseed software on the tablet and the picture just pops.

If you are ever in Chicago I highly recommend the Scout downtown.