Eve & Makoto
A fun shoot last Sunday with Alexis, Eve and Madie, three instructors from the Mihara Horse Club of Okinawa. I’ve hired horses from the club for model shoots in the past, so it was great to get the instructors in front of the camera. One of the advantages of photographing riding instructors, is that they will happily gallop along the beach without looking terrified or ending up bruised, battered and litigious.
Madie and Sky
Alexis & Sky
After getting some shots of the three ladies riding I took some portraits of them with the horses. Although it had only just turned 8AM, the Okinawan sun was already strong enough to make people squint and leave strong shadows. I brought along a large Ezylite diffuser which creates a patch of open shade in which I can shoot. Alexis’s husband Michael and my assistant Shawn were press-ganged into holding the diffuser up above their heads while I shot.
Makoto and Eve
Sky and Madie
Alexis and Sky
A great morning with lovely people and horses.
On a technical note. If you’re photographing galloping horses you’re going to need to take a lot of shots to make sure both horse and rider are in focus and that neither horse nor rider is pulling a funny face. If you’re also shooting RAW with a big camera you’re going to have a lot of data to sort through. It’s also probably time for me to get a larger internal hard drive for my computer. The 1TB, 500GB and 250GB I have for image data are almost full.
Good job I was using 64 GB cards or I'd have had to switch mid shoot.
TRAVEL 67 : Chris Willson Photography 
Storage is a big issue. Expensive, error prone, space/energy consume and also the transfer speed do not match current storage capacities. I try to have a backup of all my pics on other disks, but I didn’t find a satisfying solution yet. If I have to travel, it’s really complicated to take my data with me. It’s taking a lot of physical space as well. About online storage, I couldn’t find a good service for photographers with a good quality/price performance. They are too expensive or too limited. And it’s really hard to find Japanese like internet speeds.
One partial solution I found was to delete useless shots. I know, it takes a lot of time, so I’m leaving what I already have as it is. But from now on, I’m deleting every single shot that I think is bad or that I won’t use. I wonder what am I gonna do with thousands of pictures that are still in my HDD, which maybe only a 30% are worth keeping…