Pride

Pride, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A while back I was wittering on about ‘capturing the essence’. You can read the babble in detail here, but the crux of it is to sum up the whole of a thing by shooting an element of it. It’s supremely hard to do and I’ve been battling with the concept for years.

So this weekend was the annual Nairn Farmers Show. It’s a fascinating event where the agricultural community from across the North of Scotland descends on Nairn, or rather Auldearn, an even smaller town a few miles up the road. The main objective of the show is to enable farmers to highlight their best livestock, but it’s also an opportunity for local business to showcase their foodstuffs, crafts and so forth. In addition to the livestock show there are fiercely competitive baking, handicraft and produce growing competitions. I was amazed at the standard of the stuff on display, they have a photography competition and the quality was excellent...I might enter a photo next year.

But the critical element of the show is the livestock. Winning means a lot more than just the rosette, the value of the winning livestock skyrockets, which means there is a lot at stake for the major players. The farmers remain relaxed about proceedings but it’s obvious that they are under a hell of a lot of pressure and the rosettes must be all the more valuable in the current economic climate.

As a photographer, these shows are a brilliant opportunity. Lot’s of colour, characters and things to capture, often in difficult light and due to the packed timetable, you get limited opportunities to photograph each subject. I had several objectives in mind whilst I was snapping away, most importantly to improve my shooting of people in their environment, you can’t really call it ‘street phtography’ when there is no street…rural shooting? Ach, I don’t know. Also as the scale of the event is pretty big, it’s impossible to capture everything in a single shot, so we go back to ‘capturing the essence’.

This drags me back to the shot above, this guy was the owner (or at least working with) this massive Shire horse. The horse was immaculately turned out in an amazingly ornate piece of tack that ran the length of its body, I don’t know if it won anything, but I really hope so. What I’ve tried to sum up in his expression is Pride…you can be judge of weather I’ve achieved it all not.

The photo was a bit of a labour of love in the digital dark room. LOADS of contrast from a combination of a contrast layer in Photoshop, then I flattened the image and blasted it again with contrast from ‘Nik Silver Effects Pro’ (brilliant plug in), then I colour toned as per my guide here. I then did a bit of dodging to better bring out the guys face. Then an unsharp mask just to get the face as sharp as possible. I think the effort was worth it, it’s probably one of my only half decent photos of people.

Farmers shows run the length of the country; it’s a great day out and an excellent opportunity to shoot something a bit different. I’d urge you to head along to your nearest one. There are loads more pictures on the Picasa stream.