THE ART OF HORSE PHOTOGRAPHY

from Equestrian Hub Magazine May 2019

A SADDLER’S CRAFT

FEATURE

The Fine Art of Horse Photography

Capturing the indefinable beauty of horses is not easy. The elite photographers featured in this story talk to Jane Camens about combining their passion for horses with their passion for a great image.

On the face of it, equine photography seems like an enchanted career with those at the top of their game in demand at high-level national and international events. But the truth is that making a living out of immortalising equine grace is a hard slog.

Speaking to Ken Anderson, Nicole Emanuel, Julie Wilson, Stephen Mowbray and Lisa Gordon, it soon became obvious that ‘success’ means more than taking photos with that wow factor. It also means being financially viable. Making a career in this game involves a lot more than a good eye and great equipment - particularly in this age of smartphones and social media.

Not only do you have to do the hard yards to gain experience and contacts, you have to be canny about networking and marketing, or have a partner or associate who can do this for you. For those who travel to the big events, which often happen back-to-back, there are also major logistical issues to consider.

Making a living out of a passion for horses is never easy, but all our featured photographers have found a way to combine their passions into a unique package.

Ken Anderson

“You can destroy a horse’s future by putting up a photo of it that’s no good,” says Ken Anderson. At the same time, with a great photo you can make a horse’s career, and Ken has done that over and over again.

Based in Tamworth Ken has now been a professional equine photographer for 15 years and is particularly known for his outstanding Cutting and Reining photos. He has just been made the official photographer for the National Cutting Horse Association.

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A: Martin Larcombe – one of Ken’s first reining shots. B: Hard Hat Henry at the beach with Dave Kennedy. C: Halters as art.

photographed are Just Shameless, the famous paint stallion, and the great Quarter Horse Tap Dancin Cat. “With good cutting horses, you just drop the reins and hang on. The horse does the rest,” he says. “They get down on their belly with a look of possession in their eyes. I sort of earned a reputation for ‘those’ shots.”

Ken is a horseman himself and was out mustering the day I was trying to make a time to talk. He is also a chef and proud of the meals he cooks up for celebrity diners. “But I don’t get the buzz (from cooking) I get from doing the photos,” he says. “They’re for me. It’s a very personal thing. They’re my legacy.”

He started taking photos of stallions bred by his partner Julie who, following a massive accident with one of her horses, now works as his editor. “Julie is the one with the eye,” he says. “She’s the best judge of horses in the country. She told me where I was going wrong. ‘See that horse there,’ she’d say. ‘He’s got a giant neck. You should have taken a step back towards the hip.’ When you’re only showing a couple of photographs, you’ve got to show the best part of the horse.”

Ken is particularly aware of this when taking photos for internet sales. “Some people never see the horse in the flesh,”

he says. Although Ken is nationally acclaimed, he considers he’s “still evolving”. He has just upgraded his camera so he can capture the world of horses at another level again. “There’s just something about them,” he says.

Nicole Emanuel

Nicole Emanuel is known as ‘a master of mood and light’. An artist in several mediums, her photos deserve the fine art canvases she now prints on.

Nicole was horse mad as a child, first picking up her mum’s camera at the age of seven to photograph a mare and foal. She won her first award at the age of 12, which was just the beginning of a lifetime of high achievement in photography. She’s now proud to be the international ambassador for Fuijfilm XT-3.

She can still remember how she felt when she first entered a dark room. “I could get lost in there for hours without food or drink, I was so obsessed with developing the images,” she says. “For me I was in my element taking horse photographs.”

Immediately after studying photography at Charles Sturt University, she was picked up by a rural newspaper as a full-time press photographer. From 1991, she spent 15 years working for News Limited and Fairfax newspapers. She was a top horseracing photographer, then a feature photographer, before starting to have her work published internationally.

“Because it’s now the digital age, every second person with a camera can call themselves a professional photographer,” Nicole says, speaking from her home in Gippsland. “They sit there and do post-processing and that’s how they give their pictures the wow factor. We didn’t have PhotoShop. We had to do it in the darkroom.”

She despairs that amateurs don’t know the value of great photography and are undercutting the pricing structure for D

I could get lost in there for hours without food or drink, I was so obsessed with developing the images.

professional photographers.

You only have to go to YouTube and watch one of the films Fuji has made of Nicole’s work to see the difference a professional photographer makes, using high resolution images, understanding the importance of lighting in the moment, and using lenses that don’t distort. Nicole finds inspiration in the work of the world’s leading equine photographers Robert Vavra (Unicorns I Have Known, et al) and Gabriele Boiselle.

For Nicole, things upper most in her mind when she shoots film is “expression in the eyes, and being aware of the light. Light is everything.” Nicole spent many years on the road covering the big equestrian events and perfecting her craft including photographing brumby runs in the Victorian High Country. Some of these stunning photos featured in Australian Geographic. Others appear in her bestselling book High on Horses, which was launched at Equitana in 2003.

Now 47-years-old and a single mum with two children (an artistic son and a horse mad daughter) — and 10 horses, Nicole retains a number of impressive corporate clients, among them some of the country’s most successful horse studs. She has recently opened a gallery, Studio 87 – on the Princes Highway - where she showcases her work. “I’m seeing this as a new phase in my career and plans to have a new book out in 2020,” she says. She’s thinking of crowd-funding it and inviting other photographers to contribute.

Misty morning, (D, P23), and water shot (E) photographs by Nicole Emanuel.

F: Australian carriage driver Boyd Exell at WEG 2014. Picture Julie Wilson. F

Julie Wilson

With her award-winning journalist partner Anna Sharpley, Julie Wilson is at the forefront of Australian equestrian photojournalism. Julie has been photographing horses for 25 years and is among the fortunate few who have an ongoing contract to provide photographs to major horse magazine clients and her work published nationally and internationally.

Julie grew up in Upper Beaconsfield, outside Melbourne, where, she says, “all the kids had ponies”. When she was eleven years old her parents bought her a Shetland pony cross. “We used to ride everywhere,” she recalls. “We’d go to the shops and tie up the horses outside.”

She started taking photographs in sixth form at school where photography was part of an arts course. Her first job, with a real estate agency, saw her shooting weddings. After a detour into nursing, she decided that photography was where her future lay, establishing her business, Julie Wilson Equestrian Photography, in 1994. Since then, her work has featured in every major Australian horse magazine, as well as prestigious international publications, such as Horse International.

These days Julie is an NCAS Level 1 equestrian coach and has competed successfully in all disciplines. Her love and knowledge of horses has given her the sense of what to look for to capture a horse looking its best.

Julie tries to keep the logistical side of the business simple. Home base is Warburton, Victoria, but when she and Anna are on the circuit they live in a motor home. “At the start of the year we map out our events at the start and try to group all the ones together,” she says. The couple were about to head to Sydney to spend two weeks shooting at the Royal Easter Show before moving on around the circuit. G: Germany’s Daniel Deusser and Cornet D’Amour at WEG, 2014. H: Valegro at his retirement performance, Olympia Horse Show, London 2016.

I: Leanne Caban and Gattlin in a roping competition. J: ‘Riding Off’ – no quarter taken in a polo game. Pictures: Stephen Mowbray thousands of photos,” she says. “We know who everyone is. We catalogue every horse we photograph and a big part of our business is people buying old photos.”

Every couple of years Julie and Anna travel to work overseas. They’ve worked at the Atlanta, Sydney, Hong Kong and London Olympic Games as well as the Equestrian World Championships in Rome, Spain, Germany, the USA and France - Julie already has her press accreditation for the Tokyo Olympics next year.

Among the highlights of her career to date has been shooting the retirement of the great dressage champion Valegro at the 2016 London Olympics, and being at the first big show jumping competition in Malaysia - the inaugural Kuala Lumpur Grand Prix – when fiftyone horses were flown in from Europe for the occasion.

“It was an amazing show,” she says. ‘They’d never had a big horse event like that before. They brought in thousands of school kids, which gave the event an incredible atmosphere of excitement. It demonstrated how someone who doesn’t know anything about horses can appreciate seeing horses live. For me, the best part of this job is seeing the best horses from around the world, seeing how amazing they are. They know their job, and they enjoy it.”

Stephen Mowbray

Stephen Mowbray’s photos are instantly recognisable. People say ‘My God look at this! Stephen must have done that’.

The New Zealand-born 57-year-young photographer spends 42 weeks a year travelling in Australia and New Zealand. He was a late starter in building a career as a professional photographer, but in just seven years there wouldn’t be too many horse disciplines he hasn’t covered. Nowadays he works only on commission, never on the off-chance that people might want to buy his work. MAY 2019 - HORSEVIBES MAGAZINE 27

K: Jeremy Janjic and Django of Cacheral. L: Brooke Campbell and Copabella Visage. Pictures: Stephen Mowbray.

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He attributes the way he shoots to his background. Brought up in part by a foster family who had property in New Zealand’s South Island, slide nights were a big thing on the farm. ‘The colour palette of my life is Kodachrome 64 slide nights,” he says. “Wonderful colour. Today with digital I can enhance the colour. “

Horse riding was also required on the farm, but Stephen admits he’s no great rider. “My family will tell you I can’t ride a rocking horse,” he says, “but I guess I learned something about horses along the way.”

After school he bought an Olympus camera and a handbook on photography. ‘It taught me all I needed to know in theory,’ he said. He learnt to use it travelling around the South Island shooting transparencies and building his own darkroom in his bathroom to do black and white developing, printing and enlarging. A natural progression saw him start to shoot weddings and also to build a solid career in retail, which eventually led to positions in the Sales, Promotions and Marketing department of Coca-Cola, NZ.

He moved to Australia in 1988 and was employed by Coca-Cola Bottlers in Melbourne. “I went through their Operations courses and learnt so much about how to run a business,” he says, “it was invaluable.” He took that business know-how to run his own shop, a delicatessen that he built up and ran for over 16 years. But in 2012, his wife Vicki inherited some money and told her husband to: “Buy that lens”. It was a $12,000 Cannon 400mm F2.8, which he bolted onto the front of his Canon ID-x. Stephen was then 49 and finally ready to become a sports photographer.

Somewhat naively he headed into the 2012 Sydney Royal Easter Show and started shooting in the arena without a photography pass. A polite tap on the shoulder by the CEO of R.M. Williams directed him to the Show’s media manager. That fortuitous moment led to an invitation to publish in the R. M.

My family will tell you I can’t ride a rocking horse,” he says, “but I guess I learned something about horses along the way.

Williams Outback magazine. “I can write as well, thanks to my time in advertising,” he says, which is handy for the ‘packagedeal’.

At his first reining event a leading trainer told him: “What you’re looking for is a horse in the shape of a prawn with tail tucked under, head and neck balanced and level and front legs continuing through.”

Reining soon became the discipline in which his photos are perhaps most sought after, although polo is another sport for which he has a strong passion, and show jumping, and…”I’m incredibly proud that people want a Stephen Mowbray on their wall,” he says.

Stephen knows he could do this for the rest of my life. “It ticks all the boxes,” he says. Even so, he’s thinking of building a secondary business to pass on his skills. “I’m trying to get together a teaching platform with a friend in New Zealand. We’re looking at putting a program together either here or there, hopefully next year.”

Lisa Gordon

M: Todd Graham and No Moore One Moore. N: Dream sequence from Equitana New Zealand. Pictures: Stephen Mowbray. Lisa Gordon and her partner Peter Boyle have been on the road for the past two years travelling from one horse event to the next in a big mobile photo truck. They’re now looking to move their home and business on to a semi trailer.

“No one else does it quite like us,” Lisa says. “People are very in the moment. They want photos instantly. I can get pictures to clients within the first hour in the arena. We have three large Mac computers and load all the photos to a website.”

They need to be competitive because their equine photography business, Little More Grace (LMG), has to support the two of them. Both Lisa and Peter know horses. Lisa grew up riding and showing, and had her own equine business, ePro, before she met Peter, who had managed some of Australia’s largest thoroughbred studs.

O: Lisa Gordon captures a quiet moment on a trial ride, and below (P, Q & R), the beauty of horses in competition. Lisa Gordon

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Peter gave Lisa her first big lens and helped her reframe her life after her equine e-business went south on her. “Photography helped me heal from that bad experience,” she says. “Because I rode and showed myself and understand what people go through, I get the shots. We both understand what a good horse should look like. It’s a tough industry to be in, standing on an arena for 12-15 hours. I see why people don’t last. It wasn’t easy for us. For the first 12 months, I was the new kid. You’ve got to prove yourself to people in the industry.”

She credits Stephen Mowbray for giving her the courage to keep going. “I was standing beside him in an arena and he gave me some great advice. I’m selftaught, I keep teaching myself and I feel I’m getting better. For instance, I’ve learned to carry a squeaky pig with me in order to get the horses ears to move forward,” she says. The couple are booked solid until midwinter. “We’re heading north for the winter and, from there, we’re travelling down to Adelaide,” she says. “We’re thinking of making it across to Perth this year with the whole premise being to work and see a bit of Australia.” Lisa and Peter also do commercial photography and have a sideline specialty of framing garlands and ribbons in display trophy cabinets. “We started that in between events and it’s taken off,” she says.