Livestock Assignment
2012.08.13
Day Seventy Four. Headed out on assignment to capture some livestock doing what livestock do. Went down to Carmel Valley first, but didn't find anything near the road, so we kept heading out Carmel Valley Road. Long after the village, luck stuck. There was a small patch of cows hanging out in the shade just next to the road. They weren't very friendly cows though. The closer I got, the faster they ran and the louder they mooed, so we got back in the car and headed further into farm country. At this point, I was just driving for the sake of driving. I new the road we were on would eventually dead end into the 101, so I didn't really care where it took us. Just as I started to space out and really get lost in the drive, we found another patch of cows hanging out by the road. This mini-herd had a couple calves with them that I managed to get a couple good snaps of. Farther down the road, I got distracted and pulled over by a vineyard to snap a few shots of the expansiveness of it all. I ended up tossing most of those shots with the full realization that I'm really not sure what focal length, f-stop, or focal point to use when shooting "vanishing point" style subjects. I kept a few of them, but none of them really look "right" to me. After meeting up with the 101, we circled back over to the stables on Pebble Beach to say hi to the ponies who, due to varying factors such as the rapidly diminishing sun light and their natural curiosity, turned out to be significantly harder to photograph than I expected. The setting sun resulted in the requirement for super high ISO while what appears to be hand shake in many of the images is actually subject shake (not something I usually have to deal with). Getting the ponies to hold still for long enough to focus and snap the picture turned out to be the greater challenge of the two. My typical still life subjects have spoiled my perfectionist nature when framing an image. Difficulties aside, I had a lot of fun shooting the ponies. I want to go back with a bag of carrots so I can go around and feed them all :)
