Recently we had the privilege of doing a location shoot with Lisa and her gorgeous horse Ari (hubby Mark and their dog Barkley were also dragged along for some fun!).

As Ari is starting to get a little older, it was the perfect time to capture some perfect memories for Lisa before he loses the spring in his step!

We have now done several horse shoots on location and have loved everyone, but this one was a bit of extra fun as we decided to play with some newer studio equipment and take studio lighting on location!

As you can imagine, this posed a few interesting challenges for myself (Jodie) and photographer Annabel, as horses don’t exactly understand English…. So getting them to understand that you want them to stand in a particular place without anyone holding onto them, and prick their ears forward while looking in the right direction ….. needless to say it was a hilarious challenge!

As the assistant, it was my job to try and attract Ari’s attention in the right direction, so that the light from the studio soft box would be correct…. unfortunately my method of attracting his attention (with a bucket full of carrots) led to me constantly getting mugged by him!!

Now that I was the known ‘carrot lady’ even once I had gotten rid of the bucket Ari still liked to make a beeline straight for me in the faint hope that I had something for him!

Our perseverance paid off though – with some amazing shots resulting from this set up! Below is one of my favourite shots from this particular collection…

Due to the challenge of having the light sitting on the stand and having Ari moved into place, we then decided to change tactics and I became the stand! This basically involved me running around after Ari loaded up with the battery pack and hand-holding the light (minus the soft box…. makes it look like a ray gun!)…. needless to say my arms got a good workout!

This worked far better, as it allowed us greater freedom in our shots & could move instantly instead of having to constantly attempt to move the stand.

The best part was towards the end of the shoot when we let Ari hoon around the arena, with me aiming the light at him when he got in range.  It was like Ari was showing off for us as instead of just hooning around the edge of the arena, he kept heading straight towards us, allowing Annabel to get some awesome shots with the flash (this was probably due in part to the fact that I was established as the ‘carrot lady’ so heading to us could prove beneficial for him!!). Thankfully I am horsey myself, as most people would be a bit worried about standing their ground as 600kg of horse comes galloping towards them!

It was definitely worth it though as you can see! –

We also had Lisa saddle Ari up and go for a ride through the bush for us – against the late afternoon sky we captured some pretty dramatic shots!

There were plenty of other beautiful shots from this shoot – so feel free to check them out!