Photo weekend

This weekend was very busy. On Saturday, Lucy met her new rider, a local woman who is going to help get Lucy back in shape. I was nervous, as I always am when a new person gets on my horse, but it went great and I feel confident that Lucy will be happy! Maddy will still ride her when she has time, too. I am jealous!! The weather has been soooo perfect and I WANT TO RIDE! :(

On Sunday morning I got to give Maddy a little lesson on Brantley. At their recent show, the judge commented that he would make an excellent hunt seat horse. I was like, LET'S JUMP!

Sunday morning was our first little hunter pony lesson. I laid out a bunch of poles in the outdoor. On one side, the poles were set for a "normal" trot stride. On the other side of the ring, they were set for a longer stride. Brantley aced both of them! The next exercise was a 20 meter circle with four slightly raised cavaletti's at 12:00, 3:00, 6:00, and 9:00. The idea was to keep the pace even so that the horse fits the same amount of strides between each pole. They did it at a walk first, practicing fitting both more and less strides in there (shortening and lengthening), and then they tried it at the trot. It's a challenging exercise but Maddy and Brantley both did very well.

Brantley going through the poles

The next steps will involve actually setting up a tiny crossrail at the end of some poles. I think Brantely will do just fine.

After we were finished, I headed home, took Cairo for a bike ride, and then drove to MA for two photo sessions! It has been a long time since I pulled my camera out like that but man, I loved every second of it.

The first session was a little family shoot: husband, wife, massive 16 wk old Great Dane puppy, and they are expecting a baby too! It was really fun!

Yeah, that puppy is FOUR months old!! holy moly. He's huge!

The second shoot was with a girl and her pony. I am so pleased with how the images turned out:

Then I turned around and drove two hours home, edited a sneak peek batch of images for each client, posted them to Facebook, and collapsed into bed! It was a very long day for me but I handled it just fine and didn't feel any worse for the wear today.