Aug 25, 2009

Sisters by saddleback

Over the last week and a  half I had the opportunity to hang with Makenzie and Makayla Matthews of Rosburg. The sisters were the subject of our Wahkiakum County Fair feature that is running this week on the Life page. The girls are active in raising horses and I got to catch them on the farm and at the fair. We didn't have as much space as I had hoped to run more pix, so here's a few that I liked, some outtakes, and some that made the paper.
Makayla had a great quote that ran in the story that I also used as part of the cutline for this pic in the paper: "I wanna be nice to him so that he'll come to me, so I give him lots of treats so I don't have to chase him around. That's the fun part of having a horse — to be in love with it."

I know literally nothing in terms of horse-related stuff, but I thought it looked cool as the girls were "lunging" their horses, which is apparently a way to work out the horses excess energy before riding them.

This is easily one of my favorites as they were polishing their riding boots in a lean-to shed that also was home to that great old pick-up truck.

At the fair things moved pretty fast and I didn't get exactly what I wanted, This one I thought was kinda odd/funny as Makayla finishes a quick change in between events. A moment before this the horse was trying to help her with the belt so she had to slide over a bit.

I wish I would have stopped down the lens maybe one more full stop so that the horse in the foreground was just a little more in focus...

A lot of the time what dictates whether or not a photo runs is whether or not it is related to what is said in the story. In this case, I really liked this pic of Makenzie and her friends, but she didn't really talk about them in the interviews and so it wasn't really a part of the story.


Here's a link to the story if you wanna check that out. As I was wrapping it up on deadline I was commenting to my boss how every time I end up having to write a story I am that much more convinced as to why I don't do it more often...

-DKM

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