UP UP AND AWAY

I would be very much tempted to remove the chap in from the background, which is pretty easy to do with this kind of photo. I've found that horse riding images can have more drama to them if you pan the camera so the horse and rider are crisp, but the background has motion.

A few things you might consider:

>the “shape of the shot” – you have everything technical right in the middle and at the top of the jump but it kinds of lacks punch as a photograph, more like it is has been taken for analysis of the riding technique or something like that. Maybe if you were camera right a few feet and captured the horse and rider about ¾ Profile you would get more of that beautiful sun on the horse's head leading the shot and also more of the intent and expression on the rider’s face. This shooting position would also lessen the impact of that red pole, which cuts the horse in half.

>On the technical side of things I think that 1/350s neither one decision - nor the other: it is a bit slow if you want to capture transverse action and nail a really crisp image at that shooting distance - I would be up around 1/800s minimum – unless of course you wanted to pan it, as already suggested, then you would be slower than 1/350s – maybe attempting 1/125s, for example. You had plenty of light so 1/350s is a poor choice I think.

>On the post production it looks to me as if you have saturated the image a bit too much – but if you like that look that’s fine – but I think you have sacrificed the mid-tones in the head of the horse and the face of the rider and that is a loss IMO – I don’t’ know if you can see much difference in this smaller version, but on my studio monitor I got a lot more out of the face.

>Also, for this image I would crop tighter; lose the centre centricity; lose the squarish format to make it more streamlined - and “more space” for the horse to “jump into”.

WW

PS I just looked at the attachment above - I wrote about the "3/4 profile" before I looked  . . . perhaps Graham and I are both thinking the similarly about this point?