How and Why

Getting in close and holding the camera up above the crowd has provided a viewpoint that really shows the bustle as the crowd circulates to get a view of the horses on show at the fair.

Shooting close and wide in this way is great for getting right into the action but can present compositional difficulties. At the wide end of the 17-35 zoom range the depth of field is so great that it's very difficult to achieve any degree of selective focus and with the angle of view this wide it can be difficult to exclude unwanted background elements. I've chosen to hold the camera up high, angled down in this frame to remove some of the background and concentrate attention on the foreground elements.

Background

The annual Appleby Horse Fair 2007. On this visit to the Horse Fair I'd stayed at home all morning waiting for my new 70-200 VR lens to arrive. By midday I realized that the courier had let me down and it wasn't going to arrive. I set off to Appleby regardless, lamenting the fact that I'd missed half of the day.

When I arrived I experimented far more creatively than I would have done with the lenses that I had with me. I'm sure that if I'd received the 70-200 I'd have concentrated on trying it out rather than genuinely seeking out the best lens option for the opportunities I was photographing in. Thankfully (and somewhat ironically) this was an instance when not having the lens I thought I wanted resulted in far more successful images !