When I met Jessica several months ago she had one very important question for me, Can you shoot some of our engagement pictures with our horses? Of course I can, was my immediate response! Now admittedly, I’ve never shot engagement photos with horses before but I love a good challenge and incorporating meaningful things into engagement photos just makes them well…more meaningful.
I was sure I’d be up for the challenge but a couple weeks before the shoot I decided to try and research what other photographers had done with horses during an engagement shoot and quickly came to the realization that this is not something very many people tackle and for good reason, it’s TRICKY!!!
First you have to get the horse in a good position, then you have to get the couple in the right position, then you need to get the horse to react to something so it will prick their ears forward, the couple needs to ignore the distraction while keeping the horse under control and paying attention to one another and all of this needs to happen simultaneously!
As you can tell from the photo to the left, horses have about as much patience for pictures as a 3 year old and have pretty much the same reaction to seeing people kissing too! Ha Ha!
It’s hard to keep things very serious when the horse is sticking his tongue out at you but we did our best and luckily we had a great team of people helping us out so we managed to get the shots we wanted in the end!!
One of my favorite pictures of the day is this shot with all of the horses looking out of their stalls. I love the light coming in from the setting sun and how it reflects on the stall walls making silhouettes of all the horses heads!
If you’re considering doing engagement photos with your horses here’s what I learned from this shoot… It’s much easier to work with one horse than two, having extra help is a big help when you’re trying to get the horses to look a certain way, patience is key, and just have fun!! Many thanks go out to Jessica and Eric for making this engagement shoot so much fun, their patience and willingness to do anything was really what made the day such a huge success!
Be sure to check out the rest of Eric and Jessica’s Engagement photos (without horses) HERE!
UPDATE: They’re MARRIED!! Check out Eric & Jessicas amazing wedding photos at the Blue Dress Barn!
)
by Ben
3 comments