You already know what he looks like. Let me show you what he’s like.
There’s a version of your horse that only you have ever seen.
It’s not the one standing square with his ears up. It’s the way he swings his head around when he hears your truck. The spot on his neck he leans into. What his face does in the ten seconds after you take the halter off. The particular sound he makes when he’s decided you’re staying a while.
You’ve known that horse for years and you’ve never once managed to photograph him. Not really. You’ve got a phone full of pictures that are almost right.
That’s the horse I come for.
I don’t pose anything. I don’t ask anybody to do it twice. I come out for half a day, you go about your business, and I stay out of the way until the two of you forget I’m standing there. That’s when it starts.
If what you want is a portrait of your horse standing square with his ears up, I’m the wrong photographer — and I’ll happily tell you who to call.
Why the horse relaxes around me
Most horse photographs look tense because somebody made the horse tense. A stranger in the wrong place, holding something up, standing where a horse would rather you didn’t. He braces. And you can see it in every single frame, even if you can’t say why.
I’ve been around horses for fifty years. I didn’t point a camera at one until 2010.
My wife and I ran a guest ranch and outfitting business in Wyoming. I was a licensed outfitter in the state — thousands of miles riding and packing, horses and mules both, deep in country where nobody is coming to help you. You learn to read them fast out there, because a bad call at a creek crossing isn’t a bad photograph, it’s a wreck.
Then 2008 took the ranch business, and we moved to Montana to manage one of the largest Rocky Mountain Horse operations in the country. She did the training. I put the miles on them. Between the two places, hundreds of horses came through our hands — for the backcountry, for the show ring, for whatever somebody needed them to do.
So we’ve seen horses from every angle there is. The habits. The quirks. The manners, or the lack of them. The good, the bad and the ugly.
I know my way around one.
Which means when I show up at your place, I’m not guessing. I know where to stand. I know the difference between a horse who’s finished and a horse who’s just thinking about it. I know when to put the camera down and let him come back to it on his own.
I’ve photographed wild horses on assignment for National Geographic.
And I’m pretty good with a camera.
What the day looks like
I show up in the morning and mostly I’m quiet.
You feed. You catch him, or you don’t. You ride, or you sit on the tailgate and tell me about the year he colicked and you slept in the trailer. Somewhere in there everybody stops performing, and that’s the part I’m waiting for.
I’m not only photographing your horse. I’m photographing your hands on him. The way you check the same leg every time without thinking about it. The dog who won’t leave. The particular light that comes through your barn at four o’clock and belongs to no other barn anywhere.
I can’t tell you in advance what I’ll bring back. If I could, it would mean I’d planned it, and planned is the one thing this isn’t.
A half day at your place. Four to five hours. Your farm, your pasture, wherever he actually lives. No arena, no studio, nothing hauled in.
Fifteen to twenty finished photographs in a private gallery, yours to keep and share.
Prints available separately, printed and shipped straight to you. Order what you want when you’re ready. Nothing bundled, nothing expires.
$950
Travel: the first 100 miles from Trenton, Georgia are included — Chattanooga, Cleveland, Dalton, Rome, Fort Payne, Scottsboro, most of the Sequatchie Valley. Past that, $0.75 a mile.
Farther than that, ask. For the right horse, the right farm, the right ranch — or something I haven’t thought of yet — I’ll drive.
The ones that can’t wait
Some of these can be put off. Some can’t.
He’s twenty-six. Or the vet said a thing you’ve been turning over ever since. Or this is the last good season and you know it, and you’ve been not-thinking about it for a while now.
What most people have when that day finally comes is a phone picture from a bad angle in the wrong light. And it’s not that the picture is bad. It’s that it isn’t him.
I book these at the same rate and I put them at the front of the line. If your timeline is short, say so when you write — don’t be polite about it. I’ll work around it.
Booking
I only take a few of these. Between a day job and daylight there aren’t many weekends, so if you’ve got a date in mind, sooner is better than later.
Write to me and tell me about your horse. Not his breeding — his habits. How long you’ve had him, what he does that nobody else’s horse does, what you’d hate to lose.
I’ll write back and tell you honestly whether I’m the right person for it.
