Lesson #1 of PONY Photo School - Part 1: Portraits, Background, Focus
Would you like to take great photos of your favorite horse or horses? Well, learn from a pro! Horse photographer Marielle Andersson Gueye gives you some quick and easy steps to follow. In no time at all, you could be taking fantastic pictures like the pros!
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Photographing your favorite horse is often harder than you think, and that’s why I’m going to give you some useful hints. A good start is checking out horse pictures that you think are really good, but that may have been taken by friends or other photographers. You can learn a lot by studying how a picture is taken! I’m now talking about composing the picture; lighting, background and deciding if you want to take the picture with the horse up close, or far away, or maybe even just a detail of the horse, like an eye in close-up! |
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Maybe you want your picture to tell a story? In that case, always start with your own feeling! A picture doesn’t always have to be beautiful. The important thing is to somehow catch the interest of the person seeing the picture.
Now we’ll start the practical exercises. We’ll begin with how to shoot a good portrait of your horse. First of all, your horse must be recently groomed and look good. Maybe you’ve even washed the mane and braided it. If the horse has a bridle or a head collar, they should also be clean and polished. |
| Find a good spot with a beautiful, calm background for the picture. A stable wall seldom works out very well, unless it’s very attractive, of course. Just like school work, there’s an exception to every rule! The sky can make a good background if the weather is sunny and clear and you have the sun behind you. But if it’s cloudy, the horse will probably look too dark in the picture. If that’s the case, look around and try to find some trees, or just one tree with leaves to use as your background. If the background is too bright the camera is “fooled” and thinks that there is more light than there actually is, which will turn your favorite horse into a dark spot in the photo! If that happens, try a darker background, for instance a group of trees or something like that, and it will look much better! |
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With a short telephoto lens (if you have a camera with changeable lenses) it’s also easier to shoot the horse at the correct angle, and avoid having its head look more like a donkey than a horse! [You’ve seen those horse pics where the head looks huge, right?] Work by trial and error if you have a built-in zoom in your camera. 135-200 millimeters is often the best zoom. Another tip is that you, the photographer, can move around! Take a few steps to the side, crouch down, get up on a chair – this may help you find the right angle for a beautiful horse portrait. If you want nicely arranged pictures, the classic full-length photo in bridle taken from the side is the most common shot. Here, too, the horse has to be nice and clean, and don’t forget the hooves, which will be showing in this kind of picture! Wash them and grease them with fat or hoof oil. You can also use common olive oil. |
| Try if possible to use a telephoto lens with a zoom of 200 mm, even if this means that you’ll have to walk a few steps away from the horse. It will probably be worth it – you’ll get a photo with good depth, meaning the background won’t dominate but the horse will really be the thing you see in the picture. But the background is still important. It should be calm and pretty, without ugly fences, tools or other stuff. If you shoot the picture from the side, you can put the focus on the middle of the horse, or maybe the withers. Try setting the camera for a very short shutter time, about 1/250th of a second, as many horses don’t like standing still for very long. The horse’s eyes should be attentive, with both ears forward, and you should be able to see all four legs from the side. |
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You can also choose to take the picture at an angle from the front, and all four legs should be visible. But here, you should put your focus on the horse’s head, which is closest to the camera. Don’t give up! It may take some time to get a nicely arranged picture, and it’s not too easy to get the horse to stand the way you want it to. The finest picture may be one where the horse is just standing freely in its pen or somewhere else, with the landscape as background, with no bridle. [Try not to crop any important parts out of the shot, like its head, or feet, or tail!] I hope that these small tips will inspire you to go out and try. It’s a matter of practicing and practicing, and never giving up! Good luck! |
| Marielle Andersson Gueye has worked as a professional photographer for twelve years, mostly taking pictures of horses and other animals. Marielle took the great pictures in our recent photo book “Trouble at the Riding Camp”, as well as the wonderful pictures of our rescue horse Chica that have been turned into several posters this past year. |
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