The kind of day where heat clings to everything. Your skin sticks to your shirt. Your camera fogs up between frames. The air itself feels heavy, and every step kicks up dust that never really settles.
This show tested every rider, every horse, and every ounce of my own focus behind the lens. Not because of the competition—but because the conditions were relentless.
And still, I kept shooting.
📷 Shooting Through the Struggle
What you’ll see in the photos below isn’t my cleanest work. There’s motion blur. Light haze. Focus misses. The arena lights flickered and shifted tones as daylight faded into evening, and my shutter speed dipped low to let in whatever I could hold onto.
But the images are honest.
They are what it felt like to be there.
And to me, that matters more than perfection.
In the last year, I’ve started letting go of the idea that sharp equals better. I’ve slowed my shutter. I’ve leaned into the blur. I’ve stopped fighting for flawless and started aiming for truthful—because truth carries more weight than technicals ever will.
🐴 The Fall I Couldn’t Let Go
There’s one photo in this gallery I almost deleted: a rider mid-fall, their horse going face-first into the dirt. It’s completely soft. Not a single detail is sharp. But I couldn’t toss it.
Because it’s real.
Because that moment—the gasp, the tension, the heartbeat that stopped when they went down—happened. And sometimes, what a photo says is louder than what it looks like.
🖤 Documentary Fine Art
This is where my work lives now—in the blur between documentary and fine art. I’m not just shooting events. I’m capturing emotion, environment, and effort. I’m letting the imperfections breathe, because this world—this life with horses—isn’t perfect. It’s sweaty. It’s muddy. It’s chaotic. And it’s full of moments that hit hard, whether they’re in focus or not.
These images aren’t meant to be polished trophies.
They’re meant to hold feeling.
They’re meant to be remembered.
