Practicing for wedding photography at a riding lesson

How to practice for weddings and portraits when you’re just hanging out

Right now is a fairly slow time for my weddings and portraits. Usually around now I start getting inquiries for senior portrait photography, but right now I’m mostly just trying to figure out how to do social media better. However, being a photographer needing to do pictures of anything available. I have a goal of doing the Friends and Neighbors style portraits at least once a week. I’m also wanting to practice doing the candid style photography the way I shoot actual weddings. My feeling is a person needs to stay in shape for the big events.

So yesterday I joined my daughter Eimear (rhymes with femur and is a common name in Ireland) at one of her English riding lessons. My original goal was to do simple detail photos with the Fuji 90mm f2.0 lens and try to show horse riding with just detail photos. That goal went out the window immediately because I personally find detail photos to be really boring. Going out to practice wedding photography and being bored while doing it? To quote the great film Clueless: “AS IF!”

The Fuji is different in a few ways from my normal wedding and portrait photography Canon cameras. They’re fast, but not quite as fast. Plus I was playing around with a custom setting to make it look like I was using the legendary Kodak TMax 3200 film. When using a custom film the camera takes awhile to load each picture. So it was about like the ancient photography days with a camera like the Nikon FM with a manual film winding lever. Take a picture, wind a new frame into place. Slowing it down of course made me pay closer attention to when to actually take a picture.

I will say one thing: the Fuji is about 100 times more fun to carry around and use than the Canon cameras. Weddings, engagement, and pet portraits? Canon all the way. The rest of the time going on hikes, bikes, travel, doing my own pictures (except landscapes) I’m a huge Fuji fan. Small, lightweight, fun to play with, super sharp pictures with the two lenses I have makes for having fun with photography again. I just need to solve the problem of how to best carry it while traveling, hiking, and mountain biking. That’s always a problem with cameras. Being smaller and lighter will change the problem in my favor. Now to get it to link to my Profoto lights.

It was fun using for the horse riding. Having only the one lens really forced me to pay close attention to when and where to do the pictures to try to have the usual clean background while filling the frame with the action. Plus trying to get emotion from a 14-year-old who was embarrassed having her photographer dad there clicking pictures. All these challenges excited my mind and sparked joy while doing the pictures. Need to get doing this kind of thing more.