Flat Jump

OK, the title is a bit odd.  I often struggle with titles.  Seems like a simple thing, but how do you come come up with multiple names for essentially the same action?  I have Jump in the Sun, because for some reason the sunlight caught my name.  There's pressure here.
In this image, the illusion to me is the jump is more for distance than height.  The rider and the horse seem to be on the same page.  This isn't their first jump.
This jump also has the flower pot accessory, how cool is that?
Photographically speaking, this jump has a flower pot accessory.  How cool is that?  That shade of red doesn't appear anywhere else that I can remember.  This shot was in the almost overhead sun.  It was baking the green grass and the jump wood.  It was set for a -1 EV, and all that did was increase whatever shadow there was on the subjects.  Nice challenge.
This image needed more than the usual amount of help.  The grass was barely green.  The jump was washed out.  And the shadows needed a little boost.

I've gone from spot metering to center weighted for these shots.  Tough to tell if it is really helping or not.  Seems like it should.  I'm happy with the lighting in the camera, or at least I have a good idea of what it's going to do.  I've found on sunny days, all my Nikons respond well to a -1 EV setting.  For most of my sheltered life, that would work.  But with this horse event, there are more shadows than what I'm used to seeing.  The JPG conversions in the camera handle them OK, but with RAW processing, I think I can do better.

The real winner, to me, in this is the grass.  The green is there.  The jump isn't blown out, there is some good definition in the wood.  The subject works for me too.