I promised you horses - horses you shall have

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For the first half of Easter we were attending an equestrian endurance ride at Collie in Western Australia. I’ve mentioned this a few times but now some are getting a bit anxious to see a photo of a horse. I like leaving you all in suspense sometimes! The reason for the delay in providing a horse photo is that I didn’t take any this time so I have to wait for Vince to process them. Vince shoots them (photographically speaking) in something called ‘raw’ which means each photo can be anything up to 19 megabytes. Raw allows him to do a lot of editing. Horses and riders that were lost in shadows on the road can miraculously be made to appear out of the darkness and using the ‘haze’ button removes any background fuzz which may be spoiling the photo. Then the skin tones can be improved, the photo cropped and so on. Once all that is done, it needs a watermark and number put on it. He reduces it to about 3kg then puts it up on the endurance riding Facebook site. After all this, if I’ve brought him enough cups of coffee, he emails the ones I’d like to be. I used to have access to his photo files but Windows 10 in its wisdom has done an update and for the moment I’ve lost that option. Here you see three riders enjoying their ride. They are all Arabs (the horses not the riders) which are the preferred breed if you want to be competitive in the sport. The stirrups of the first rider are designed so that the feet can’t slip through should the rider be thrown from the horse. There have been many nasty accidents where a person’s foot has slid right through the stirrup and they’ve been dragged. Several of the horses also have protective foot- and leg-wear. One thing with being stuck out in the bush is that the horses were all surprised to see us and so most of the photos show the horses with their ears nicely pricked.