This winter I started working on some indoor lighting portraiture for horses. A long delayed exploration but my curiosity got the better of me and I started collecting lights, determined to overcome my hangups about it all and just do it. I have been curious about how I would interpret horses under fixed lighting. I have always been a natural light photographer. Horses should be bathed in sunlight I always say.
I like to move around and play with the light from the sun from different angles. It's kind of a dance and I am most comfortable doing that dance.
Studio style lighting was a different ballgame. As I got into the experimental sessions, I started to enjoy a different kind of creativity and challenge. I dropped my silly fear of light meters and settings and precise measurements and all manner of assumed advanced mathematical calculations which never seem to come up anyway. If any of you studio photographers weren't laughing before, surely you are now.
Just like when my dad made me first learn to drive on a standard transmission before I got to drive the automatic, I made myself first try out the lighting thing with a bay and a black horse. I didn't allow myself the "easy" white horse that you see here until a few sessions later. They each require a bit of a different set up, more intense lighting for the dark horses, softer and more subtle for the white horse.
Rain and gray overcast conditions are a way of life in the Oregon-Washington I-5 corridor, and many photo sessions, even in summer, end up being postponed so often due to weather. My farm call scheduling can often be a lesson in frustration. The studio lighting is one more trick in my arsenal to bring out when the shoot has to happen and the weather is not cooperating.
Stacie Burgess' beautiful Andalusian mare Nadia E is the subject of this, my latest works in studio style equine photography .
Stacie and I had a lot of fun turning the hay room where she boards Nadia into an impromptu photo studio. Nadia was such a good sport about it all, we were able to do some dress up with her as well. As you can see, she looks great in red!
A bit more fine art style, below is a little tribal fetish style feather & gem jewelry which Nadia wore with panache. Many more images from this session just need more time to go over them!
1 comment:
you inspired me to try this some time!! Thanks!
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