Traveling the backroads past the fields of Castleton in a mid morning winter I came upon these two white horses. I already had the Nikon 200-400mm lens set up on my D3s and pulled over to create a few Images. With a telephoto zoom, you are automatically going to compress the image so I thought the expanse of the field would provide some image depth. I happened also to think of both the grass and trees as nothing more than sheets of textures, that I really did not want any detail of..
The colors of winter are ..well .. colorless. You are working mostly in monotones so this was a chance to think ahead about how I’d process the Image later in the digital darkroom (DD). If you are shooting white on a dark background, your best bet is to set your camera to expose for the whites. You can do this fairly well using your spot meter on just the horse then locking your auto exposure (AE) button. The scene is front lit so using that spot meter is doubly important as the camera will expose everything evenly and quite well, my issue is that I was going to make my subjects (the white horse) pop a bit so they needed extra exposure attention.
In the digital darkroom (DD), I worked the image without the help of the ubiquitous B&W photoshop plugin Silver effect pro. There are a few old school tricks that I came across and I had some fun pulling everything together.
Both my sisters are long time horse owners and riders so I’m going to have some heavy critique coming my way once they see these Images. Wish me luck…..
