Wellington Area Trail Riding Club

It's great to have finally caught up on the backlog of photos. Waitohu is uploading now, and all going well, I'll be able to put the finishing touches to the set in the morning. You can get to the set through the photos page as usual.

Results were out today for Belmont and Waitohu, and are now on the results page.

We're looking forward to the club championships at Bulls. It's a great venue and ideal terrain for a championship event.

Waitohu was a challenge for me, photographically because of the amount of forestry. In a mature but well maintained forestry block you have low light areas that are often mottled with very bright areas where the sun is able to break through. The smaller patches of very bright light amongst otherwise quite dull areas make it more difficult to get exposures correct.

Compensating for low light without flash means sacrificing some quality in the image to get the picture, and close examination of the shots taken under those conditions will reveal the speckling of the image that comes from using a "fast" sensor setting (eg. ISO 1600) and the fuzziness that comes from the blurring of moving subjects at low shutter speeds, or in elements of the picture that are not within the compressed "in focus" range that results from wide apertures.

I guess you could say that was my own fault - I could have kept to the open areas of the trail and minimised the time spent in the forest. However, I had a very good walk so can look forward to planning next year's outing with much better knowledge of the trail than I've had to date.