Thursday, October 2, 2008

For Pity's Sake, Smile ALREADY!

So over the weekend I had to be the photographer for one of our client's horses we are putting for sale on the internet (yes, you can sell a horse on the internet...just not ebay). So we primped the horse, put on it's most silvery, sparkly apparel and took it to a somewhat scenic area to take it's picture. Now when you take a horse's photo, there's more to it than just standing the horse there and snapping away. First you have to make sure it's body is symmetical, it's standing square, and that it opitimizes what you're advertising, for a western pleasure horse you want the horse standing with it's head kind of down...for a halter horse, it's head needs to be up. And for all of this, the horse needs to "SMILE" in horse language (i.e. it's ears need to be pricked forward...that's a smile in horse language).

Our horse was rather bored with it's whole photography session. I tried having the client getting the horse to smile or at least look somewhat interested...she tossed dirt in the area, flipped a rope around, made strange sounds...to no avail...so we switched places...I tried tapping the horse on the nose, made a ribbit sound, picked a weed and tried to bribe such a horse...NOTHING... and then I took the weed and waved it BEHIND my head (in front of my head didn't do a thing)...and we had the horse's attention...for about 5 seconds....which was good enough for session one... and about 2 pictures
Ho hum...one bored horse....

Then we had the second session to go...and I got the brilliant idea of getting a scoop of grain...oh we had the horses attention then...and the client forgot to turn the camera on...so we try again and this time the horse knows what's in the scoop, so we REALLY had it's attention, so much so that it wouldn't stand still long enough to be photo'd...why is it we go from one extreme to another...LOL...well, we did get some good pictures...we only had to take about 100...LOL
See how well grain works? I have her total attention!


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