by Charles Mann
Just in time for the show season, Horses All offers the following excerpt from Photographing and Videoing Horses Explained—Digital Film: The Horse Owner’s Manual for Improved Portraits, Schooling Tools, Sales and Promotions.
The horse is one of nature’s most beautiful animals, so it is surprising that so many photographers—both amateur and professional—fail to portray the horse well.
Here, I will give you some hints and suggestions on how to improve the quality of your photos and capture better images of horses at leisure or in competition.
If you are a breeder wanting to promote your stallion or stock, or someone who just wants to sell a horse, knowing how to take an image that really captures the buyer’s attention is paramount.
Finding the Right Solution
Identifying “what went wrong” and learning how to fix it is an ongoing aspect of photography. Often, understanding the cause can help you resolve the problem.
In this excerpt I will focus on some of the most common problems in everyday photography, both with film and digital cameras. Each problem will include some reasons why the trouble occurred and offer some tips for how to fix it in the future.
Exposure issues are common. Not only is every situation unique, but it may also contain elements that complicate the matter of taking a good photo.
One exposure issue arises when you try to photograph either a very light gray or a black horse in bright sunshine.
Most camera meters want to make both the gray horse and the black horse 18 per cent gray, which is “middle gray.” The exposure will vary depending on how much of the horse is filling the frame.
Fix:
Take a meter reading on a grassy spot that is lit the same as your subject. Lock the exposure (or manually set the camera for that exposure) and take the picture.
On some cameras, the exposure compensation feature can be used to make the meter believe that a scene is brighter or darker than it appears.
Another situation that can be tricky occurs when the light behind the subject is much brighter than the light in front of it. Backlighting tends to occur when you are standing outside on a sunny day and the sun is behind your subject (pictured below right). It is also a common problem when photographing while standing in a barn, with a brightly sunlit scene outside the door behind your horse.
Fix:
Backlighting problems happen because the photographic media (the film or digital sensor) has a limited latitude range, or range of tones that it can record at a given exposure. This means that it cannot record all of the tones in a situation that has both very bright and very dark elements.
The metre takes all available information and averages the exposure. This is why movie sets have so many lights—to bring all the light levels on each element in the scene to within the latitude of the film they are using.
Reflectors, fill-flash, or scrims (netting-like fabric used in lighting effects) can add or subtract light and even out the exposure in a scene.
If you don’t have additional light sources available, and you are not worried about keeping the background as an integral part of the shot, you can use the center-weighted or spot metering patterns to calculate the exposure of your subject.
A particularly difficult lighting situation is one where there isn’t enough light. This can happen inside a barn or indoor arena, or occur very early or late in the day, and on very overcast days.
Fix:
To add light to a situation, you can use a flash or photographic reflectors. You can also find a makeshift windshield sun blocker. This can be anything with white, silver, or gray sides, such as a sheet, trailer, barn, or any other bright object or structure.
Did you ever wonder why gray horses have a green cast on their bellies in some pictures? It is because the light reflecting off the green grass lights the belly of the horse. As you try to add light to a situation, beware of anything that has colour, because the colour will reflect onto your subject.
Just as you may not have enough light, there are times where there is too much light. A good example of this is when you want to photograph a very light coloured gray horse that is almost white with another horse that is darker, or in a setting with a lot of dark elements.
Fix:
Things that can be used to subtract or block light include photographic scrims, darker windshield sun blockers, white or black sheets, trailers, buildings, trees, and other barriers (pictured above right). Just remember that nearby objects will reflect their colour onto your subjects.
Red eye—or “green eye” in the case of horses and other animals—occurs when light from the flash reflects off the retina.
When the ambient room light is low, our pupils dilate. Because the flash is usually close to the axis of the camera lens, the light from the flash bounces off the retina and right back at the camera, which is then recorded on the film or digital media.
Fix:
To help eliminate red eye from your photos, use the red-eye reduction setting on your camera or flash, if it is available. This sends out a pre-flash, before the main flash, that makes the pupils constrict and lessens the chances of the flash reflecting off the retina.
Moving the flash off the camera lens axis is another way to correct the problem. If the flash is moved far away from the centre of the lens via an extension cord or strobe lights, the light cannot reflect off the retina directly back to the camera.
As a last resort, you can always buy a correction pen at the photo lab to cover up the red eye in your prints, or learn how to correct it in a graphics program such as Photoshop®.
Charles Mann first started photographing horses in the mid-1970s. He has covered the 1996, 2000, and 2004 Olympic Games; the 2002 and 2006 World Equestrian Games; the 1999 and 2003 Pan-American Games; and countless other major equestrian events of all disciplines.
His photographs have won numerous awards, including the American Quarter Horse Association’s Steel Dust Award, the American Horse Shows Association Media Award, and the Chronicle of the Horse Photo of the Year.
When not on the road in search of the next great equine image, Mann lives in Rising Sun, Maryland, USA.
To order your own copy of Photographing and Videoing Horses Explained—Digital Film: The Horse Owner’s Manual for Improved Portraits, Schooling Tools, Sales and Promotions, see this month’s Book Barn on page 81.
Reprinted by permission from Trafalgar Square Books, www. horseandriderbooks.com.
