Indoor Polo and Photography Challenges

Last week when I was back in the rain and humidity of New York I had the opportunity to watch my boss play polo… indoors!  Nope, not water polo!  Real Horse-involved-and-all… polo!

Ya see, his polo club has options, either they play on one of two 300 yard by 160 yard pitches, or if it is raining… like it was on that particular Wednesday evening… they move it indoors, in a quite sizable barn.

I had joined up with Kevin in hopes of photographically capturing something different.  Man was I in for a challenge!

   

Initially I captured a couple of decent outdoor (in the mist) shots as best as I could lighting conditions permitting.  The horses were beautiful, strong peaceful animals and quite tolerant of this camera tote’n, Bostonian wearing interloper mingling amongst the riders, the keepers and the other steeds.

The challenge came in when the action started… again not on the field, but in the dimly lit barn.  Camera setting had to be greatly modified to even begin to capture the action.  ISO jacked to 1600 – Check!… Fastest Lens @ 3.5 – Check! shutter speed as slow as I dare go @ 60 – Check! 

Ha!  Who am I kidding these are going to be grainy as 1930’s ‘Talkie’! and blurrier than Rosie O’Donnell’s figure!

Doesn’t mean I didn’t try!  And yep sure enough upon my opening the images on a full resolution screen, about 90% of the images were indeed crap!  Discernable yes… but still crap when it comes to quality!  My kingdom for a Nikon D3s!  and a super fast lens!

I did however have an idea.  In a tip learned in one of my many Photoshop instructive publications it counseled to not get rid of grainy, out of focus images that have pretty good content.  Rather, alter them using any of the many image filters available in Photoshop!

And voila’ creativity in action!

More efforts can be seen here [Link]

Enjoy…