Must Have Photography Equipment for Horses

Money Maker Camera Harness

There is one piece of equipment that I have grown to love, and I absolutely could not live without it. That is my Hold Fast Money Maker camera strap in Buffalo Leather. I have grown so attached to this strap that without it, you would probably find me accidentally chunking my camera into thin air expecting my trusty Money Maker to catch my camera, only to be extremely disappointed when my camera ended up crashing to the ground. I have gone a few times without this strap and I was on pins and needles the entire time shooting, worrying something would happen to my camera. I have tried traditional straps, hand straps, and too many other straps to count..but this is the winner.

 I have horrible back problems, and the Money Maker completely takes the pressure off of my neck and back especially when shooting with my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for hours on end.

The Money Maker keeps my gear safe and out of the way when I am not shooting. The life of an equine photographer can be dangerous for equipment with unpredictable horses and sometimes wild shooting conditions. I know that when I am positioning horses, leading them, or holding them for a client that my camera is always out of the way and safe from any potential hazards.

This is also my life saver when I am shooting with two camera bodies, at some sessions I prefer to have two bodies with different lenses on and ready to go so that I can switch between the two easily. At weddings this is a necessity as you have to be ready for anything at a moments notice.

Nikkor  70-200mm 2.8 Lens

When photographing horses and people, it is so important to pay attention to a image distortion and compression. Essentially the wider angle lens that you use, the more distortion you will have, where the longer lenses will have less distortion and more compression. When I say “wide angle” I mean lenses with a smaller mm such as a 24mm or 35mm lens. These lenses have extreme distortion make whatever is closest to the camera appear larger. Have you ever seen a picture of a horse and thought to yourself, “That horse looks like a donkey!” or “That person’s nose looks huge!” well you can blame that on lens distortion due to the photographer using a wide angle lens. Wide angle lenses also have less compression meaning that objects behind your subject will appear far away and smaller. When you put a longer lens on the camera such as a 200mm lens you lose this widening effect in the center of the image and you get a picture with nice and normal proportions. You also have more compression when using a long lens, this compression effects your background, making items in the background look larger and closer to the subject.

Choosing the perfect lens can truly make or break an image and can completely change the impact that an image has on the viewer. I use my 70-200mm lens for everything horse related, although it is much heavier to tote around than a 35mm, I truly could not live without this lens. This is also a must have lens for wedding photographers because of its versatility and ability to capture the action of the day without being too intrusive.

Lights Light and more Lights

It was my own wedding day that made me realize the importance of lights. We had the most gorgeous sunset and guess what, we have no epic sunset pictures to remember that gorgeous sunset because my photographer wasn’t well versed in off camera lighting and didn’t have lights readily available to set up an epic sunset picture.

Wether you are a wedding photographer or a portrait photographer it is extremely important to be able to work in all different types of lighting scenarios and to beautifully capture any scene. On a wedding day, what happens if the timeline runs behind and you end up having to take every single bride and groom portrait outside in the dark?! What would you do if you just had a flash on your camera? Well, you would probably end up stressing out and producing sub-par portraits for your clients. What would happen if you were photographing a client’s horse and a storm came rolling in and you lost all of your good light 30 minutes before you thought you would, would you end your session early? Call it a day? Produce some images that were dark and try to save them while editing? Or step outside of your comfort zone and pull out lights to produce some one of a kind epic pictures?

Lighting gives us the ability to work in all different types of environments and be prepared for any situation that may arise. I always show up to every session and wedding prepared with lights even if I may not be planning on using them. At the very minimum I always have at least 2 flashes, but often times you will find me with about 6 flashes, and two strobes because I tend to like to over prepare and make sure I am good to go for any situation.

About three years ago I set out to challenge myself, at each and every session I try something new. I try to create a new portrait that I have never done before, I try at least one new pose, and a new lighting technique or set up. Sometimes it works, and other times it is a total bust. But I always let my clients know at the end of their session if time allows that I would love to test something new out of them and I have ended up creating so many different one of a kind pictures this way. These pictures always end up blowing my clients socks off because they are new and unique and edgy and most importantly they are pictures that they never expected to receive. I have gone on to take different variations of these pictures and incorporate them into my session workflow.

 Back Up Equipment

This is so so so so so important. I can not stress the importance of having back up equipment, and even back ups for your back ups. Especially if you are photographing weddings, you need to make sure you have a back up for your back up, because you simply can not afford to miss an important moment on a wedding day.

At the very minimum you need to have a back up for your, Camera Body, Batteries including your Camera Battery/Flash Batteries/Trigger Batteries, Memory Cards, Lighting Equipment, and lenses.

Essentially you should know in your head that at any given moment that if one piece of equipment in your bag fails, you will know what else to grab out of your bag to keep working and have peace of mind that you can still produce quality work.

While we are on the topic of Back Up’s it is also import to think of back up storage. I highly recommend shooting with a camera that has dual memory card slots that will allow you to record two copies of all images that you take just incase you have a memory card that fails. Once those images come out of your camera and onto your computer it is so important to have multiple copies of your images stored. I recommend keeping all of your images in 3 locations until they are delivered to your client, so that could be on your computer, and two back ups on external hard drives or you could use a cloud as one of your back up sources. Just remember that digital storage is not 100% fail proof so it is best to have your images stored in multiple locations.

Ear Getters

When photographing horses you will be in a world of hurt if you do not have a box of tricks to get horse’s ears up. I carry a box of items to each session so that I always have things on hand to get even the most stubborn of horse’s ears up. I keep everything from wrappers, to squares, dog toys, cookies, mints, and so many more items ready to go. To find the best items to get those ears up I find myself buying random items that make noises and testing them out at sessions, some of them make the cut others not so much but keep in mind that what works well with one horse doesn’t work well with every horse so make sure to try things out with multiple horses before you write them off.

Don’t worry I will be sharing a blog post soon with some of my favorite ways to get horse’s ears up.

Have questions about anything you see on my must have gear list?! Feel free to comment on this post and I will answer all of your questions.