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Sunday 29 July 2018

Tommy the Camera-shy Horse

This is Tommy. He was one of the beautifully turned out horses pulling the fantastic looking horse and carriage for Josh and Julia's wedding at Southdowns Manor in the Winter of 2016.

As you can see, he's a fabulous horse but when we started to take photographs of him we noticed a problem. He hated having his photograph taken.

It wasn't flash, we never use flash when we first start to photograph an animal.

Jacqui loves horses (unlike Steve!!!! See our blog post: the Story Behind the Picture: Slobbering Shetland to find out why) so before she starts taking photographs of horses she'll go up to them, find out their names, talk to them and rub their noses. Steve doesn't!

All was going well until Jacqui tried to take some photographs of them. Tommy freaked out. He seriously hated having his photograph taken.

Our first reaction was "HE'S IN THE WRONG JOB!"

Then Jacqui noticed that it wasn't the taking of photographs that was the problem, not the flash, not the camera but it was the breaking of eye contact with him as we brought the camera to our eye.

Occasionally we have this problem with brides and grooms. When we do we work as a team where one of us holds eye contact and the other takes the photographs.

So we adopted this well-practiced approach with Tommy and it worked like a dream. 


Fortunately, the other horse Charlie was no bother at all when it came to photographs. In fact he seemed to quite enjoy it and even pose for the camera.

Using this method we were able to photograph both horses as they waited patiently in the rain for Josh and Julia to board the carriage (note that Tommy is keeping a very careful eye on one of us). 

Tommy was as good as gold as we photographed them pulling away...

...and trotting down the country lane.

Despite the terrible rain,  Josh and Julia had a fabulous trip in a beautiful carriage with two beautiful horses.

Tommy and Charlie were both wonderfully behaved models (once we figured out what Tommy liked) and they looked amazing...even in the rain.

by Jacqui and Steve

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