LOVETTSVILLE: MY FIRST HORSES
A few weeks ago I drove to Lovettsville, Virginia to co-teach one of our Hybrid Artist workshops with Judy Reinford. This one was a little different.
Judy and our host, Victoria, had arranged access to Alivio Equestrian Academy - a local facility owned and run by trainer Tina Legno - and several of her Lusitano horses. Lusitanos are a Portuguese breed with a history that includes bullfighting - bred specifically to be brave and extraordinarily agile. The horses we photographed demonstrated both, and that combination of courage and constant fluid motion is exactly what made them such a challenge to photograph and such compelling subjects.
I've been a pet photographer for a long time, but I had never photographed horses before. I knew it would be different. I didn't quite anticipate how different. I came home with just over 3,000 images from a two-hour session - which sounds excessive until you account for six large animals in constant motion. My normal studio pet session runs 30 to 40 images. A moving horse is a different problem entirely! Getting the right angle, the right focal length, the right moment when everything lines up - it took me hours to edit down to 118 favorites, and I'm still not sure I made all the right calls.
During the workshop I completed a digital painting of one of the mares we photographed, Gesa. She'd been running the arena while we photographed her, kicking up sand and dust as she moved. The arena background wasn't something I wanted to keep - but the way the dust rose around her made me think of water. She has a warm, dark coat, and I wanted to push against that with cooler tones, so I placed her on an overcast beach with waves breaking behind her. I had a lot of fun with that painting and I'd genuinely like to do more equine commissions.
I’ve only just begun editing some of the other 118 images. I thought I’d start with some of the pretty profiles.
The other painting I completed during the workshop wasn't a horse at all. Victoria, our host, had an old photograph hanging on her wall - discolored and faded - of a Spaniel she'd had as a child named Charlie. As a small thank-you for her generosity in opening her home to us, I took a photo of it with my phone, restored it, added color, and painted it in Photoshop. The before and after are below.
This workshop had a different texture from others we've taught, and not just because of the horses. A group of us shared the same house for the duration, which means we cooked meals together, edited side by side late into the evenings, and generally spent far more time together than a standard classroom setting allows. The live shooting session - photographing the horses and then working with those images during the workshop itself - was a genuinely fun hands-on element that we hadn't done before and will almost certainly do again.
My part of the workshop focuses on the canvas embellishment, which requires having finished prints in hand well in advance - so the hands-on photography twist didn't affect that portion.
The finished canvases at the end of the three days tell the story better than I can.
Our thanks to Tina Legno of Alivio Equestrian Academy for her generosity in sharing her horses and her facility with us.
If you're a photographer curious about what these workshops cover, details for upcoming sessions are at pouka.com/hybrid-artist-workshops.
If you have a horse - or a dog, or anything in between - and you've been thinking about a portrait, I'm happy to talk: pouka.com/commissions.