Photographing Horses For Equine Art – 3 Useful Tips

Want to create your own piece of equine art? If you’re frustrated by photographing horses, read through these simple tips, and improve your skills until you get the horse photos that you’re looking for.

Photographing Horses For Equine Art – 3 Useful Tips
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Kit_Heathcock]Kit Heathcock

Horses make beautiful subjects for photography. So majestic, full of life and free, capturing their very essence on camera can result in a stunning piece of equine art. There are however a lot of challenges for the would-be horse photographer.

Horses move fast. Catching them on camera can be tricky. All too often when your camera is on Auto you end up with an unsatisfying picture; it’s not sharp enough, or the horse has already moved half out of the frame by the time the shutter has clicked.

Here we have three simple tips to help improve your photography skills. They don’t just apply to photographing horses but also to any other animal in motion.

Know your camera settings
Ideally you need a camera with some manual or semi-manual settings that you can use to maximise your chances of catching that perfect shot.

Set your camera to shutter speed priority, TV or A on most cameras.

For horses that are racing or jumping, select a fast shutter speed of at least 1/500s. For horse portraits where the horse is standing it can be slower but no lower than 1/60s.
Check what aperture you are getting to go with that shutter speed.

If there is low light you might need to change the ISO setting to get an aperture that gives you enough depth of field. On most modern cameras an ISO of 1600 still gives you a useable result.

Focus
When a horse is moving fast, perhaps over a jumping course or in the wild, often it’s gone by before you’ve had tome to focus and click. If you’re not using a professional lens, which has a very fast auto-focus capability, you might prefer to switch to manual focus. Then you can pre-focus the lens on a set point, perhaps the jump itself, so that all you have to do is click when the horse is in the right position. A lot of amateurs miss the shot they want because their lens is slow to focus on auto.

Take lots of pictures
We tend to think that professional equine photographers get the great shots just because they’re good – well that’s true, but it is also true that they take a lot of not so good photos too. The secret is that they take lots and lots of photos altogether. The more photos you take the better chance of one of them really being something special. So don’t stop after two or three shots. Keep taking more. Photograph that horse every time it soars over a jump. Take that horse portrait from different angles and just keep on clicking that shutter release.

Kit Heathcock, freelance writer, is writing for Rachel Dubber, a well-known [http://racheldubber.com/]equine artist and photographer, with a lifelong passion for horses. She creates a wide range of stunning [http://racheldubber.com/]horse art, photography and sculpture. Currently based in Cape Town, South Africa she portrays the individuality of each equestrian subject, both for portrait commissions and for her own art.

Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Photographing-Horses-For-Equine-Art—3-Useful-Tips&id=6906402] Photographing Horses For Equine Art – 3 Useful Tips