Hand-held shot at the Annual Warkworth Rodeo. I had this challenge in mind so tried to get a sequence of shots that might work. This was the closest I could come. I'd prefer the horses to be spaced out more but I guess they had more on their minds than posing for photos at the time :)
I was trying for bull riding to start with but was shooting in RAW and the bursts were not lasting long enough. I switched to JPG for the bronco riding and this is what I got. I didn't use one frame from the nine I got and that would have been a horse between the first and second in the shot. The pose was great as the rider has his hand in the air nicely but it obscures too much of the first horse.
The title was suggested by scarbrd and is a line from a song (you can google for it if you like). At first I didn't notice there are eight horses in the shot and that is the same number of seconds the riders aim to stay on the bronco.
Editing Steps: * Load 9 frames into photoshop as seperate layers
* Align frames as there were small variations due to hand-held shooting
* Clone minor elements from background frame that would be visible in final image
* Mask out background in frame 2-9 (frame 2 not used in final image as it was overlapping too much with first horse but it was a nice hand-in-the-air pose)
* Levels
* Merge visible
* Shadow/Hilight
* Hue/Saturation
* Shadow/Hilight with fence at left and stand at right masked off
* Noise reduction
* Hue/Saturation
* Curves
* Flatten
* Resize
* USM on horses and stands
* Add border
* Save for web
* Hope I'm not DQ'd as these new rules are confusing :)
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I think i would have liked it better if it was just every second one...seems a bit crowded. Never the less, I like how continuous the horse's motion is:)
Well captured and well processed - pretty much faultlessly so. It's a shame that it looks as though one of the shots alone might have been more exciting that the whole lot :-)
This is a great shot. If you are receiving comments from the same people that commented on mine, then they are probably going to say you have too many frames bunched together. Unfortunately they will look past the 8 riders you have and the title and how it all ties in with the theme of Rodeo riding. For that I say forget them!
Great image, and the only rodeo one I have seen. Best of luck with my 9.
Ahhhh...this is nice. After seeing so many images that don't really have much to do with motion, here's one that captures a bit of the essence of this sport! Each frame is an important moment in those eight seconds. Nice idea and well executed.
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