Amethyst Hill

When I first started photo showing, all my friend Lisa and I had was our Breyer tack, but our photos were still competitive. Since we used real outdoor backgrounds, not studio sets, not all of our photos came out perfectly. This was also way before digital cameras so we never knew which photos were going to be good until they were developed and looking them over after we got the photos back from the developer was an exciting activity. Though a bit disappointing sometimes when the photo you thought was going to be awesome came out fuzzy or with something obviously out of scale in the background. Sometimes we sat down immediately after we’d looked over our new photos and drew up another list of horses to take on our next photo shoot. (I recently got a scanner and I've just finished putting up some of these old photos which can be seen in the Amethyst Hill Gallery.) I don’t think many of these old photos could compete with the kind of photos that are shown today, but twenty years ago our efforts made Sunset stables a serious contender on the photo show ring.

In the beginning most show hosts charged a fee per class and there was no flat entry fee. Most classes cost a nickel or dime apiece. As photo showing became more popular, more shows began offering unlimited entry for a flat fee of one or two dollars. The awards usually were hand-made ribbons (either construction paper or photo copied slips of paper), but we didn’t care if the ribbons were hand or professionally made we just loved that our horses were winning. Winning was fun, but so was picking our next shows, deciding what classes to enter and taking photos of our models, sending off our entries and then getting them back weeks later.

A few show hosts loved the waterfalls in our photos so much they asked where they were taken and we told them…the Garden Grove Library. It was hard to believe it but none of the scenery in our photos was on the banks of any real streams or waterfalls and why would we take them anywhere else when our photos came out so beautifully there? Often Lisa and I would gather our models, tack and props and carry them in paper grocery bags to Lisa’s mother’s car and she would drive us to the library. Other times we would pack a few models, tack and props into backpacks and go to the library on our bikes (it was only a few miles from where we lived).