I had the opportunity late last year to photograph Canadian Cutting Hall of Fame Cowboy Fred Duke! I met up with Fred at his Barn located at Duke Ranches where he was training a new horse to Cut. Using a Flag attached to a pulley cable system, the flag is quickly moved from one end of the training arena to the other quickly and the horse and rider must keep up and stop as quickly as possible. The timing of the "STOP" is crucial for the sport. In practice, the flag represents a steer/cow which has been isolated from the herd and must be kept isolated for a certain period of time (usually around 2 minutes). I was amazed by how low the horse and rider could crouch down towards the ground. Unfortunately, this was my first time taking photographs of the sport so my lighting and timing were off. However, after an hour of shooting and upon reviewing the images with Fred, I quickly understood what was expected of me and what a "good" photo would look like. This would definitely help me with my timing when the cows are brought in for the real life testing in the coming weeks! I can hardly wait!

Lighting and Camera Settings

Camera set to aperture of F8 and, speed of 1/200 (could have changed this to 1/80), sec, ISO 1000, white balance to flash, using a 50mm f1.8 lens (el cheapo but el sharpo).

My lighting setup was simple, One SB900 on a stand at 1/4 power as the key light to light the rider and horse's face and a SB600 at 1/2 power as a rim light to separate the rider from the background. The arena is super dark and so the use of Speedlight was essential. I could have pushed my camera at the higher ISO and got an grainy photo that may have stopped the action but with the flashes, I didn't have to worry about high shutter speeds. I just used the flash to stop the action!

Portrait Session

Lucky for me, There were a few other riders in the arena, so I decided to sneak a few portraits with them to test out the light. Same light on the first image but for the horse portrait I used the SB900 with a 24"x24" soft box to get that nice soft wrap-around light.