Hoys Photographer

[simoncooke]

Hi All,

I have just read the disturbing post by "Annoyed Competitor - Guest".

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “I cannot believe that the HOYS photographers have to explain why they are rubbish as photographers. I have shown at HOYS for the past 4 years and upto them getting in at HOYS, I never had a problem with the photographs.”

The Event Photographer response … If RTI were so brilliant how is that Grandstand Media offered us the opportunity to take over from them. RTI used to charge for Copyright up until the point they lost the HOYS contract to us. We have never charged Copyright because we think it is an unscrupulous and unfair practice to make people pay for something twice. Tell me of another industry where you are asked to pay twice.

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “Firstly RTI gave me a choice, i could either pay £15 or have the choice of the additional extras and pay £20. Because of the greed of the new photographers, i now have to pay a minimum of £20.”

The Event Photographer response … As far as the tent sales team inform me every one wants a frame and almost everyone wants the lettering on unless it interferes with image so we feel it is more honest and quicker for all concerned to have an all inclusive price bearing in mind that speed of service is an issue in a busy tent and that most competitors will be uneasy about leaving their horses unattended for long. By the way we do a deal on three 9 by 6’s for £40 – that’s £13.33 each. If you club together with a friend (as many folks do) that’s really quite cheap for a HOYS photo.

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “Secondly I am informed by the old HOYS photographer that any payment made to HOYS from the photographers is a "Commission" bid (A voluntary payment). So I deduce that Event photography bid the most. I also know that Event photography have a very good friend on the HOYS committee, hence another reason for their successful bid.”

The Event Photographer response … We do not have a very good friend on the HOYS committee. This statement is a downright lie and libelous. I notice that you make this post as an anonymous guest. Perhaps you could show some guts and reveal you identity? We pay for the rights to “provide a photographic service to HOYS competitors”. It is not a "Commission" bid and believe me there is nothing “voluntary” about the payment. It is a considerable sum and it is set by Grandstand and largely non-negotiable. It is an expensive show for them to stage and they are justified in passing on some of this cost to us is we are going to exploit the buzz and extravaganza they create. I have no idea if your deduction that Event photography bid the most is true or not; you would have to ask Grandstand that. Also you do not bid or ask to be the photographer at HOYS; it just doesn’t work like that. You get asked and then have to make the decision if you want to take the job on and if you are happy to pay for the rights.

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “Thirdly I am part of a committee, that had Event barred from photographing at The South Of England Show, because of their unprofessional manner as Equine photographers.”

The Event Photographer response … I hope you are pleased with yourself on this score because we have had a lot of our customers say that they are unhappy about this and what on earth were The South of England show thinking of? Did you consult you competitors before you made this decision I wonder. I assume that you are referring to the evil and dastardly practice of gently shaking tic-tacs to encourage a horse’s ears forward. If that is your objection then perhaps you will note that we have a policy of always asking the rider or handlers permission to take a head shot and if they express a desire to be passed by then we absolutely respect their wish and move on to the next competitor. It sounds as though maybe you are not a competitor yourself and perhaps shouldn’t be playing God with whether or not competitors should be allowed to have their horse’s headshot or standing shot or presentation shot taken. If indeed you are on the committee for the South of England Show then perhaps at the prices you charge to enter classes you should let you competitors / exhibitors decide if they would like their horse or ponies headshot taking or not.

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “Fourthly Why do "Event" have to explain why they are so bad at Horse Photography. This "Classic" Dressage shot is no such thing. It is a photograph that i have had the unfortunate experience of seeing used by many equine photographers, of my horse and quite frankly does not show my HOYS horse as it should be shown. The Side on shot, is important because when shot correctly, it will show the full extension of the horse and all its musculature from the side, it will show the correct position for the horses head and neck and emphasize the horse movement. this "Classic" dressage shot as they glibly call it, will never be able to do this. It is a bad shot and i think it is used by Event because they cannot get "The boring" side on shot. when the horse is moving towards the camera it is difficult to see whether the extension is a full extension, and therefore if the picture has not achieved this "Movement" and there is a bend in the legs, it is hard to make this bend out. I have shown horses for 25 years and the side on shot is the hardest to achieve. there are a lot of so called photographers employing the "Multi shoot" who still cannot and never will be able to guarantee getting the correct moving shot. RTI did manage to get most of them at the HOYS that he covered and I am informed that he does not and never will use the "Multi shot" technique. Most of my friends try to take their own pictures at Shows and they have to use this multi shot effect in order to try and get that moving shot, but they still fail 9 times out of 10. There is absolutely no skill involved as my 6 year old daughter will testify.”

The Event Photographer response … If you read the comprehensive reply you would have seen that this was to be offered as an extra to the side-on shot as a lot of our customers said they had loads of side-on shots and when would someone do something just a little bit different IN ADDITION to the side-on shot. It appears that you are commenting on an email I sent to a HOYS competitor without bothering to read the contents of it properly.

Fifthly for £20 a picture I would expect a cardboard frame that does not fall apart.

The Event Photographer response … The cardboard frames or mounts as they are known more correctly are not designed to last for ever. They are not wood or plastic but cardboard with a price to suit. They are not waterproof or rainproof and cannot be put in the washing machine. I’m not sure what you’ve done with yours but I quite often visit people places and see our photos in our mounts standing the test of time. Anyway I thought you’d never bought a photo from us so how would you have any first hand experience of them pray tell?

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “"Event" claim that there are reasons for missing various moving shots. but during 2008 they had 3 photographers in the arena, and when we did our individual show, they still kept a photographer in. so how did you miss us then? No misbehaving horses then?”

The Event Photographer response … We have never had three photographers in either ring at HOYS so you are again wrong and mis-informed on that count. Please get you facts right Annoyed Competitor Guest. We are only allowed one photographer at a time in the International Arena and two maximum in the Caldene. We didn’t stay in the ring during anyone’s individual show this year. Wrong again! I don’t understand the bit about misbehaving horses.

Annoyed Competitor Guest’s post … “I am absolutely annoyed at the feeble excuses given for their poor photography and absolutely disgusted that in 2 years of HOYS coverage I have not, nor have my friends, had a decent picture taken. I cannot believe that HOYS have employed "Event" as their photographers. ”

The Event Photographer response … Yes it true we didn’t get a perfect photo of everyone but frankly I’m finding what you have said hard to tally with the number of compliments we have had both at the show and on the phone since. I know that it is incredible frustrating for people not being able to see the photos due to the website overload and I can totally relate to how much that must wind people up. I apologize again for that – I’m feel sure that I’ll shall go to my grave apologizing for the overload on our web server that I don’t really have any control over! No photographer can guarantee to get 100% result for every competitor – if they think they can then they are delusional. We have heard so many people moan about RTI over the years so I think that it is fair to say that they didn’t please everyone all the time or anywhere close according to some people that we have spoken. Naturally as I am in the business as him I have met and spoken to Steve from RTI and he seems to be a thoroughly pleasant and likeable chap and he also takes great photos so how come so much hard feeling toward him that we have come across? I can only conclude that it is the pleasing all the people all the time that he didn’t quite achieve.

I find it quite disturbing that someone such as Annoyed Competitor Guest gets to post such blatant mis-information on these forums. I suppose that is the luxury of being an anonymous / guest poster. You are hiding cowardly behind the fact that you can’t be traced and your identity cannon be revealed!!!!! I guess people reading this post will draw their own conclusions. Could it be that you are a close friend of RTI’s? Hmmmm – I wonder!

Forgive me going on a bit again but when I see a post like Annoyed Competitor Guest‘s with so much shameless mis-information and blatant stirring I feel duty bound to provide some sort of explanation and put a few mis-truths straight.

On a positive parting note our web site has now been up without a reboot for 2 hours since it has been repaired and fortunately competitors are being able to find (multiple) photos they like and successfully place orders!

I hope our web server continues to behave itself and that you will all be happy with you photos.

Many thanks for listening,


Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

[simoncooke]

Hi Tuppence,

Thanks for kind and helpful post recognizing that “All this diagonal and lighting stuff is out of your (our) hands”.

With regards to your comments about “this issue is not unexpected” and “You need to provide a portal that can cope with the demand”; I can almost hear people thinking, well come on guys it happened last year – you should know what to expect in terms of load on the web site and God only knows you’ve had enough time to do something about it. That’s an entirely justifiable conclusion to come to on the surface, however, since last year we have upgraded our server twice already during the season solely in anticipation of HOYS. Yesterday I applied for another upgrade in a moment of utter frustration. We are now paying £299 + VAT for a dedicated server. I don’t know how into IT you are but the next step up from this is to go for a cluster server type setup and you into £1,000’s per month as used by Tesco, Argos etc e.g. big retailer. Unfortunately there’s not a great deal in between. HOYS happens once a year. We cannot justify upgrading just for the one month that coincides with the HOYS overload – we would have to sign up for a whole year; so that’s in excess of £12,000 cost for a year just to cope with HOYS! This extra cost ultimately has to be passed on to you the customer because we don’t do any other events that generate that sort of peak of traffic. Yes we get a lot of traffic during the year but never anything close to the HOYS peak. You must know yourself that for an average county show you still look at photos at your leisure. There is nothing leisurely about competitor’s or their nearest and dearest’s hunger for HOYS photos. With the costs of the rights to be Official Photographer to HOYS to pay and adding that £12,000 plus on top all of a sudden we are either doing the whole exercise for free or we have to put our prices up. No one wants a hike in prices. I already feel bad enough about the extra we have to charge to cover the Official Photographer’s rights. I don’t want to alienate and upset our loyal season-long showing customers by appearing to rip people off “just because we can” because we are at HOYS and everyone else charges a premium.

Our server deals with an extraordinary load because when people go on our website they are there to look at photos. Each time someone clicks on a small thumbnail a larger image appears which varies in file size from 200Kb to 400Kb. When I looked at the server stats yesterday morning to discover that 1,800 people were trying to download images of that size; well I’m sure you can do the maths. That is one h**l of a lot of processing. You can turn caching on in your web browser but this doesn’t help download each new image.

“It would help you a lot if you could send people home during the show to start adding photos. (Unemployed teenagers could do this).”

The reality of HOYS is that during the show I struggle to run regular backup of the photos we have taken yet alone get photos pre prepared for loading on our website. The photos must be shrunk / optimized for the web and generally that process would not be guaranteed to finish before we open the tent in the morning. Our priority at the show is about serving customers quickly and efficiently. None of our staff is allowed to change anything on our main show server because beyond all else that machine must work without problems and be fast. As it is I am up at 5.00am to check all the systems in the tent are working before I leave for the Caldene Arena. After the Caldene finishes I go to the International Arena to shoot until 11.00pm and am lucky to get in bed before 1.00am 2 hours later and my wonderful wife, bless her can be up even later than that. Time is at a premium and so is sleep. It just isn’t practical to send someone home to start processing web files during the show simply because we can’t even spare the time to copy them to an external drive etc.

I hope that helps to give you a little bit of an insight into the practicalities of how it is at HOYS for us and explains a little more about the issues we are up against with the website.

Thanks again,

Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

[loopyloo]

well i have just ordered 4 pics, and pleased with all of them, could have bought loads more, if budget would allow.

[r.e.d]

I've never had any problems with The Event Photographer, any photos I've bought from them at different events have been great. There's always a wide choice of photos, a good place to view them and helpful people.
Ive never had a picture I have wanted to buy from RTI

[columbine]

Now managed to access website and very pleased with the pics.
Will definately get order from me.

[poop]

Well everyone I have spoken to has been thrilled with their HOYS photos, including people whos ponies were winners at the show. What a winging miserable bunch of gits these 'guests' are. I hope that the photographers aren't upset by this minority of moaners, there are many very happy customers out there.

I think the Event photographers photos are very good value and I would always choose them over other photographers who blatently rip people off by charging copyright release of up to £40 per photo to use them on a website or journal ad.

Personally I was gutted that the Event photographers weren't at the South of England show this year, I was really upset that there was no photographer at all at the show, I don't often win but on this occasion I was looking forward to having a picture of a homebred pony standing at the top of the line.

SO to 'Annoyed competitor guest' if you really are part of SOE commitee i do hope SOE manage to get it together a little more next year and book a photographer for the show, its pretty poor having a show of that size and not even being able to organise a photographer!

The Event photographer has been doing the photos at the Royal Welsh for several years now and I have never heard any moans about them, there are far more competitors there.

[tuppence]

Hi Simon,
Yes I admit you cope with a huge demand spike. That would require an operation like Tesco to deal with it. But I still think that next year you could start up loading images on the first day. This would reduce the number of hits per day your site experienced.

Why is the lighting so much poorer in the Caldene Arena? It seemed pretty similar to me.

[simoncooke]

Hi Tuppence,

“But I still think that next year you could start up loading images on the first day.”

A fair comment but please bear in mind that our tent is stuck in a car park at the NEC Arena. There is no broadband there and as we are “on the road” company our home is also our office and I don’t think either Rebekah or myself would be too happy about “Unemployed teenagers” as you put it in your original post having access to our home unattended for seven days whilst we are away at HOYS. I’m sure many people would be able to empathize with that sentiment. If I were that teenager I’d be straight on the phone to all my friends! And if something went wrong during one of the upload sessions which are quite technically involved as we use Apache running on a UNIX server I definitely wouldn’t want to come back (after five days of hardly any sleep) to the nightmare of a website that has been messed around with by an unqualified teenager. Before I began working as a photographer I worked as an IT consultant for 10 years and UNIX can be a challenge even for the highly qualified and experienced. Letting an unqualified teenager anywhere near it would be a recipe for disaster!

The issue with the lighting in the Caldene is that it is not as bright as in the International and therefore the camera is working at a much higher ISO and is more susceptible to focusing errors given that we don’t use a flash. Also if you had looked up at the lights which you probably wouldn’t have any reason to because horses are far more interesting you would have noticed that there are two different types in use. The old school yellow sodium discharge lamps mounted on the roof and the Quartz Halogen lamps on the gantry that the Caldene advertising banner was suspended from. If you set your light balance by the yellow light you get a very different colour temperature than if you were to set the colour by the whiter halogens and vice versa. The fact that there are two lighting sources confuses the camera. As I stated somewhere before competitors complained last year that they were too yellow so we biased for true colour which I’m afraid is a little cooler and looks less colorful. It is much easier to correct and add colour saturation to a true colour photo that remove a yellow cast from a yellow photo. Don’t forget as well that the human eye is incredibly adaptive to different lighting conditions whilst cameras aren’t as I’m sure that anyone who tried to take a photo in the Caldene without a flash will bear testament to. I’ll bet they came out horribly yellow.

The presentation photos were taken with a full frame studio camera with vastly superior colour calibration which is great for presentations but very poor for action / movement photos as it suffers from a tiny, but never the less unacceptable, shutter delay. We used the most appropriate camera for the particular application; one for trotting / cantering and one for standing and presentation shots.

I hope that answers you’re question,

Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

[bubblyxx]

Oct 17, 2009 14:13:30 GMT simoncooke said:

It often depends on which diagonal the horse is on as it passes the photographer. If a horse or pony is on the wrong diagonal when it passes the photographer exactly side on that is the photo you will get. If we wait until moments later when it is on the correct diagonal it may have passed the point were it is side-on and raise the complaint (in the previous paragraph) where it looks as though it has gone passed the “sweet spot” as we call it.

I would just like to point out that the horse will be on the correct diagonal on the NEXT stride which is a matter of nano seconds.

Regarding the available photographs, I have looked on the web site and have the following comments:
1) Why only 3 photos per line ? It takes AGES to trawl through the photos. Maybe that is something that can be looked at? A facility to "jump to page" could help as sometimes us Customers need to go back and have several "looks".

2) In the small hack class - the photos of the horse I am looking for have the following statistics ....... 13 trotting photos taken of which 7 are on the correct diagonal and 6 incorrect. Of the correct ones, approx. 50% are "mid stride" and do nothing for the horse (knees bent etc.). That leaves me with 3 possible photos out of 13. This gives me the impression that the objective is to take as many photos as possible in the "hope" that some of them will be good enough. A bit like "Pot Luck". Even if that is not the intention - that is my perception and I am The Customer. Having said that - the Pot Luck has produced 3 photos that I could be willing to purchase - so the strategy may be working. However, if only the "quality" photos were loaded then less space would be needed on the server and I would need less time to hunt the decent ones down.

3) As a (very) sad person, I also had a look at some facts and figures for the small hack class :
- 19 pages with 18 photos per page (17 on last one) = 341 photos
- 45 photos of the presentation (of which 50 % look very similar!!) - leaves 296 photos of "The Class"
- 21 horses in the ring - makes an average of 14 photos per horse
- if the number of "quality" photos is the same as for my horse, then that means 23% if the photos are ok.
- 23% of 296 = 68
This implies that there may only be 68 quality photos of the 21 horses in the ring. Just think what this means across the whole show (showing elements only) if these stats applied to all the classes.

Oh - and Glad you came on EP to speak directly to everyone.

[Hmrph]

Oct 17, 2009 21:25:54 GMT simoncooke said:

I hope that answers you’re question,

Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

Excuses, excuses, excuses! Perhaps you should invest some time in training up the photographers in how to photograph a moving horse and how to follow the movement, rather than giving them a whole host of expensive equipment and getting them to hold down the button and hope for the best!

[fayeandash]

I have bought lots and lots of pictures from the event photographer at many different events, and each time i have struggled to decide which photo to buy as there have been so many good ones to choose from, i think they are fab xx

[simoncooke]

Hi Bubblyxx,

Bubblyxx wrote ¡K ¡§I would just like to point out that the horse will be on the correct diagonal on the NEXT stride which is a matter of nano seconds.¡¨

The Event Photographer ¡K I¡¦m not too sure what a nano second is; I thought it was a millionth of a second. If that¡¦s the case and we got our timing right to within a matter of nanoseconds / millionth of a second and the result was three good movement shots of your horse I guess I should be proud.

Bubblyxx wrote ¡K Regarding the available photographs, I have looked on the web site and have the following comments:
1) Why only 3 photos per line ? It takes AGES to trawl through the photos. Maybe that is something that can be looked at? A facility to "jump to page" could help as sometimes us Customers need to go back and have several "looks".

The Event Photographer ¡K Fair comment. I¡¦m not going to change the number of photos per line now because people have already started looking and they may have already made a note of which page their photo was on. ¡§A facility to "jump to page" - that¡¦s a good suggestion I will look into that. I know that you can jump a few pages ahead but only about five or so. On our viewing stations in the tent you can do that ¡V we just changed it before HOYS.

Bubblyxx wrote ¡K 2) In the small hack class - the photos of the horse I am looking for have the following statistics ....... 13 trotting photos taken of which 7 are on the correct diagonal and 6 incorrect. Of the correct ones, approx. 50% are "mid stride" and do nothing for the horse (knees bent etc.). That leaves me with 3 possible photos out of 13. This gives me the impression that the objective is to take as many photos as possible in the "hope" that some of them will be good enough. A bit like "Pot Luck". Even if that is not the intention - that is my perception and I am The Customer. Having said that - the Pot Luck has produced 3 photos that I could be willing to purchase - so the strategy may be working. However, if only the "quality" photos were loaded then less space would be needed on the server and I would need less time to hunt the decent ones down.

Bubblyxx wrote ¡K 3) As a (very) sad person, I also had a look at some facts and figures for the small hack class :
- 19 pages with 18 photos per page (17 on last one) = 341 photos
- 45 photos of the presentation (of which 50 % look very similar!!) - leaves 296 photos of "The Class"
- 21 horses in the ring - makes an average of 14 photos per horse
- if the number of "quality" photos is the same as for my horse, then that means 23% if the photos are ok.
- 23% of 296 = 68
This implies that there may only be 68 quality photos of the 21 horses in the ring. Just think what this means across the whole show (showing elements only) if these stats applied to all the classes.

The Event Photographer ¡K I¡¦m not going to argue the toss with you over numbers / stats especially in view of the fact that I don¡¦t know which horse you are talking about and I¡¦m quite exhausted with having covered HOYS and the nightmare we¡¦ve had getting our web site back up properly. To suggest it is Pot Luck I have to admit I find a bit insulting; there is just a little more skill to it than that.

I understand that we take a lot of photos and that can be a hassle when sifting through them. We aim to give people a decent choice instead of taking one photo and proudly declaring ¡§there you go; there¡¦s the perfect photo; we don¡¦t care for your opinion, that¡¦s your lot, you¡¦d better be happy with it because that¡¦s the only one your getting¡¨. We get positive feedback from a lot of people for providing some choice. You could get a perfect angle on the right diagonal with a perfect stride and still not get the perfect photo simply because the horse¡¦s ears weren¡¦t forward. There isn¡¦t time to review the photos in camera during the trot around so we keep shooting in case there is another opportunity to get a better shot and worry about what we¡¦ve taken when the trot around has finished. I¡¦m sorry we had a low hit rate of success in your case.

As regards the Presentation photos; I don¡¦t take chances with the focus perhaps not being bob on bearing in mind focus in low light is a bit of a numbers game. When taking a standing shot of horse and rider there is a reasonable possibility that one or other might have their eyes shut so we take a few just to be sure. The same with head shots of horses. Again there simply isn¡¦t the time to review them in camera as you go and neither is there the time to review all of 70,000 to check whether their eyes are shut or not after HOYS before putting them on the website because just look at the criticism we have received from some quarters on account of the delay in getting all the photos uploaded and our web server hardware repaired.

Bubblyxx wrote ¡K Oh - and Glad you came on EP to speak directly to everyone.

Thanks. ļ

Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

[simoncooke]

Hi All,

I’m not too sure what happened to the formatting in my last post. – I think you’ll be able to get the general gist though.

My original purpose for coming on these forums was I suppose to defend our corner a bit and try and explain what’s involved in getting the photos on-line, what we have tried to do differently this year and to try and give people a bit more of an insight to how HOYS works in reality and the challenges it can present. Also to reassure competitors in the light of a very frustrating experience on our web site that we were very actively and urgently trying to resolve the issues.

I have tried to answer some of the criticisms head on and as honestly as possible. Some of the issues are a bit complicated and thus the long winded replies in places. I think if I have probably provided enough explanations with regards to issues raised here already and in answering any more would be in danger of repeating myself so I think I shall probably leave it at that. We are however always open to constructive criticism through which ever channel whether here or directly via email or phone.

As it turns out with our web server, our website was slow on Friday and Saturday because of a hardware failure which was fixed by 3.00pm on Saturday afternoon. It has been working at 90% load ever since and has not crashed once and seems to be reasonably fast considering the sheer numbers of people connected some 2,700 at one point on Sunday!

Can I suggest if folks want to compare photos along side each other perhaps they could try using multiple browser windows open and flicking between the different windows.

I would particularly like to thank the kind folk who have come forward to say something positive about us and the service they receive whether at HOYS or else where. These include fayeandash, wensleystud, columbine, Dolsey, loopyloo, coffeepot, tessy, alo, busybusy, zeebeedee, ahj amounst others. It is very heartening to receive your support and your posts help to balance the overall picture of how we performed at HOYS. We hope that we have done you proud.

Thanks also to tuppence and bubblyxx for raising some challenging issues. Some of you points you can see I agree with and others I’m afraid we shall have to agree to disagree; either way it has been a useful exercise to thrash it out on these public forums. I would just say that what we would like to achieve in an ideal world and what we can achieve in the high-pressure 19 hour day working environment at HOYS are two different things. We have moved the game on considerably since last year and intend doing the same next year.

On Sunday evening I uploaded photos from the following classes …

Wednesday – International - a_Class_26a_Lightweight_Show_Hunter_of_the_Year

Sunday – International – t_Grand_Finale

Sunday – International - VIP_Portrait_Request

I have also found a flash card of photos that needs to be recovered for a class in the Caldene on Saturday. As soon as it has been recovered I will put a note on the website and get them uploaded.

Finally it is good to see people using the free Send as a POSTCARD to a friend service, (something that I set up especially for HOYS) and that there are plenty of orders coming through for multiple prints which suggests that we did indeed succeed in providing a breadth of choice for a significant number of you.

All the best to everyone and we wish you every luck in qualifying for HOYS 2010, and lets not forget a big thanks to Grandstand Media for putting on such a wonderful and extravagant Horse of the Year Show yet again! Where would we be without HOYS?

Simon Cooke
The Event Photographer

[cake]

I was really pleased with my pics , I bought four at HOY's and having looked on line I have found another that I will probably get. Also found the staff at the show really helpful.

[Smithy nli]

I had two horses at HOYS in different classes. There is not a single photograph of them that I am pleased with. However, I will make do and order one of each, purely as a memento of the day and not because I am pleased with the product or think that they do my horses justice.

Therefore, just because the orders are rolling in, don't automatically assume everyone thinks you've done a good job!

And the prices are a rip off in my opinion.

[columbine]

Smithy, that's a shame you could not really find any good photo's. I have an interest in 2 different classes and found plenty of good ones to chose from. You must have just been unlucky.

[Babieca]

Sometimes it is just the luck of the draw with the "live" photos- The ones I've seen from HOYS looked very good to me (& my Dad is a photographer)
I've been a customer of Event Photographer in the past and am more than pleased with the several I've bought.

[deejay]

Why do there have to be the "Event Photographer " slashed across the photos??? I cannot justify ordering a photo when I cannot see the pony properly. Ears back, eyes closed, - cannot tell for the huge writing acoss in three places.

Also totally agree with smithynli, rip off prices. Bring back RTI.

[guest101]

I just went to look at photos of my horse on the event photographer website and there is not one I would want to buy! i am so so gutted not being able to get a photo of my horse competing at HOYS! The standard of the photos are shocking as at every other show we have been to this year I have bought about 4 photos at every show as there were so many good ones that I couldnt choose between them! most of them were actually from equinational. I so hope they bring back RTI or use equinational as it is gutting for any competitior not being able to buy a pic of their horse at HOYS.

[guest101]

Also can I ask why they take photos of only the riders standing in line (well in my class anyway) and not the HORSE and rider together???!! as who wants a photo of just the rider and no horse?! or at least take a mixture. RTI always took standing shots of horse and rider in the line up and you would always be sure to get a good photo.

[Sara]

I have to say my pictures were both really nice and there were at least 20 to chose from- although not all great but there was a choice, i found in the RTI years you only had one trotting and one standing pic.

[cake]

Oct 21, 2009 8:00:37 GMT guest101 said:

Also can I ask why they take photos of only the riders standing in line (well in my class anyway) and not the HORSE and rider together???!! as who wants a photo of just the rider and no horse?! or at least take a mixture. RTI always took standing shots of horse and rider in the line up and you would always be sure to get a good photo.

Quote' Who wants a photo of just the rider'. Well that would be me then as I bought a beautiful photo of my daughter.

[zeebeedee]

Ditto I really like the one of just the riders and may well buy one unless someone else buys it for me first! They also took a lot of the horse and rider in the line up but my horse wasn't going to put his ears forward for love, money or tictacs!

[hopeteam]

I too understand how difficult the lighting etc etc etc can be, but when you have worked your fingers to the bone all year qualyfying your pony for HOYS, all you want is A good picture to capture the moment, so you as the photographer should be able to understand how absolutely infuriating it is to go online and find there are NO decent pictures.

I think people on this thread who are voicing there dis-satisfaction have every right, and they are not looking for you to tell them that the lighting was bad etc etc, they are simply asking that you step up your game, or that they get back a photographer who satisfied their photography needs, everytime!


Sorry if my post comes across as rude or ignorant, it is not at all suggested in that manor.

[girly]

Last year we were so disappointed in the photos we didn'y buy any. This year the problem was that we had too many good ones to choose from. A big thank you for suggesting suitable croping on one of the photos and then doing it for us.

The videos are another question, the last 3 years have been dreadfull so am not holding my breath this year.

[BLIZZARD]

Well i have heard it all now hahaah as an equestrian photographer my self being trained by one of the leading photographers in the horse game there iss no need for all this rubbish explanations. no person should defend them self on a social forum site how silly!.