Horse photography | Anna Jarlhäll

Horse photography - Tips and advice from Anna Jarlhäll

I have long dreamed of photographing horses as I could combine my interest in flash and studio photography with my passion for horses. The goal was to create artistic horse portraits in the same way as when I photograph portraits of people at home in the studio.

By Anna Jarlhäll

Horses have been with me since I was a child. Started riding at riding school and then have my own horses that I competed and trained in both jumping and dressage. A little more than five years ago I started photographing horses and since then there have been hundreds of shoots, mostly with natural light and sometimes with some lightening.

For this shoot I wanted to find a suitable location, a large and quiet stable. There is plenty of room for both my equipment and horses. As a horse photographer, it is important to see it from the horse's perspective and safety is very important.

Horses are generally difficult to photograph because they are flighty animals and can be easily frightened. Try to find horse models that have a calm temperament and handlers who can hold the horse in place with great patience. It is important that everyone involved in the photography is calm and not afraid of horses, something they can immediately sense. Everyone involved in the photography must be clear and firm and e.g. dare to move on a horse's butt or bend in any direction. Simply knowing what it takes to hold and move a horse.
In this type of photography, I feel that I have great use of my long experience around horses after all my years as a horse girl.

It is important that the horses are well cleaned and their equipment properly polished and that during photography you keep an eye on any watery eyes and nostrils. A big challenge for horse photographers is that the model is constantly moving, which means that the light is constantly changing.
It is not easy to control and pose the horse, but a lot depends on giving detailed instructions to the attendant who is holding the horse. It is challenging to get the horse in the desired positions, it is important to have an eye for how it should be and wait for the right moment.

At the moment, I work with slightly smaller photo backgrounds, but the dream would be to have backgrounds where the horse gets a proper place. Ideally I would like a 6x4 meter backdrop but I haven't quite found what I want yet.
The idea was at first just to have a black background, then used a large black fabric, but I also want to try one of my Manfrotto Vintage backgrounds. I understood that it wouldn't be enough for a horse but I wanted to try since it is possible to add background afterwards in Photoshop.

Before we start the shoot, I try to trigger the flash a couple of times so that the owner and the horse are prepared for when it hits. However, none of these horses reacted significantly to the lightning.

My large softbox Rotalux Octa 135 cm from Elinchrom creates a nice, soft head light. For this I used my D-lite RX4, a flash that I feel very comfortable working with. Power to the flash was fixed by the stable helper, thanks for that. As a peephole, I had a smaller stripbox with rasters and an Elinchrom ELB 500 TTL. Since the ELB 500 TTL is battery powered, it was easy to move the stripbox around until I found the right position.

Had another flash as well as a white reflective screen with me but I chose not to use them as I didn't want to build in the horse or scare them. An incredible amount of safety thinking is required when it comes to horses, anything can happen.
Introduced the horses calmly and nicely and they got to know my studio for a while before they "entered" it.

It is not simply knowing how a horse should stand in order for it to look good in the picture, how the head and ears should be. You don't want a horse that looks like it's sleeping with its ears back (which happens to most horses after a while).
A good trick to use is to e.g. have a crunching sound from a mobile phone, a bucket of treats to rattle or another horse in the stable that the horse model becomes interested in.

You also don't want a horse that is overly tense, like the 3-year-old I photographed. She looked for other young horses walking outside the stable and had more than half her head above the background at all times.

A good thing is to mark on the ground approximately where the horse should stand with its front hooves so that the person holding the horse has something to start from. For me, the expression of the horse is important, to capture a feeling.

I used a fixed 85 mm lens and shot with as short a depth of field as possible, which of course makes it very difficult, but I think it's so nice when you get it right.