Horse and rider ala Bobbie Goodrich
Horse photography is not as easy as it seems. First, you need a rider who can make the horse look his/her/its best as this rider does. You want the horse collected when you are shooting the animal on the flat. You want the horse in mid-air when jumping. When I see the horse’s hind feet planted in preparation for the take-off, I think it’s the photographer who has jumped… the gun. Wait a nano-second. Another thing I’ve noticed is that if you see the perfect shot through your viewfinder, you’ve missed it. You’re too late.
Then, you’ve got to get the right angle to make the horse look like a horse. You’ve got to be fast and learn not to ‘lead’ with your camera so the animal is in the frame. (You can wind up with just the front half or the rear half if you aren’t careful.) You’ve got to catch the horse at the right moment in his stride. Shoot at high speed and in continous mode. Once you’ve done that and your horse and rider are perfect, you then notice that your background is messy and detracts from your portrait of a magnificent animal.
In this photo of a young woman cantering her warmblood, I’ve deleted the messy background. Like many farms and ranches, the background was cluttered with feed troughs, farm implements, a telephone pole or two, etc. To get rid of it all would have been a chore not worth attempting had I not seen a NIK instructional video.
You may have guessed that I have quite a few plug-ins to enhance my Photoshop capabilities. Why? Well, it makes life easier and quicker and in the case of NIK filters with their control points, you can make changes to specific areas in a few seconds. Without the filters, I might be slaving over trial and error techniques for minutes or even hours. Time does fly when you are doing Photoshop!
This photo was done in the style of Bobbie Goodrich. Bobbie is an artist and has the artist’s sensibilities regarding background, depth of field, color cast, etc. Not being an artist of Bobbie’s caliber, I can’t list them all. I had watched a NIK instructional video taught by Bobbie and was impressed with her results and techniques.
See: http://www.niksoftware.com/learnmore/usa/index.php/webinars/archives#/FUSION with Bobbie Goodrich/0/0/91/0/0/page:1
Bobbie also gives workshops at her home in New Mexico. See her website: http://thewestredefined.com/2011/02/fusion-merging-and-compositing-bootcamp/
These techniques can be used for portraits of people as well. They can be used to create mood. They can be used, in other words, to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.