I Shoot Horses, Don’t I?

Posted on 08. Feb, 2009 by Mark in Horse Photographs

It’s important to branch out and expand your horizons a bit so a few weekends ago a client of mine (her dog, Zach, won the Bay Area Top Pet Contest ) invited me to come photograph her horses up in the Oakland Hills at the Anthony Chabot Equestrian Center. She has two gorgeous ones: a big guy named Luxor and a lovely lady called Georgia and, while we were there, a pony named Socks came out for her close-up as well. It was an interesting experience.

Horses are amazing but they outweigh my normal subjects by anywhere from 10x to 30x and require an entirely different mindset and approach when it comes to photography just from scale alone. As an added complication their eyes are on either side of their head so, while I’m completely used to capturing expression from humans, dogs and cats this is an entirely different world.

Luxor, is a seriously big guy — 18 hands (that means huge!)– and when he’s running at you at full speed that’s a whole lotta horse. Hope to meet you again soon, big fellah

Luxor