The last week of January I was in Springfield, OH at a friends barn/ place of employment taking some winter portraits of her and her horses. This friend is working on starting her own business as an equine trainer and had a clients horse in the barn as well who ended up inspiring and being the subject of the photograph I want to talk about.

As a little background information, I took 98% of 2022 off, for my mental health and the for the sake of making sure my business would survive and fingers crossed thrive with my return. I did a lot of thinking in the last year and have decided that it is perhaps time to focus more on areas of photography I enjoy— equine photography, events, and live performances.

So in an effort to honor going back to my roots the plan for 2023 is to focus more on equines and equestrians doing both lifestyle and more fine art images. With a big goal to see at least on of my images published in Horse’s Illustrated this year.

But I digress, the image I want to talk about is a lowlight capture. A capture that highlights the facial features of the horse using natural lighting for a very dark, but rather cool fine art equine portrait.

The lowlight and natural light used to create this image resulted in fine grainy pixels that make it feel artistic in nature. Added to that the original image cast the horse featured into a backlit silhouette which allowed for the lighting to naturally highlight the facial features of the horse.

This wasn’t a complicated image to make. It was more a right time, right place, right angle, and right look kind of image. That then came with an idea. I was doing a lot of well light but lower light version of equines portraits and none of them in the end could have accomplished this particular image. And sometimes that is just how it goes, and sometimes we get lucky and all the elements line up and happen naturally.

Keep looking for the shots.