You may remember the personal gift I created for my Mum of her homebred horses? I said I would give more details on, what was, a tear choking gift! 🙂

So here I thought I would explain what I started with to achieve the image.

Firstly I had to conspire with her staff to do a day and time they could all be there to hold the horses. We then had to remove my Mum from her West Sussex Livery yard for a few hours, which is a feat in itself but a dear friend managed to drag her off to the beach even though it meant cancelling a doctors’ appointment.

Originally I had intended to take a photo of all the horses together at the yard.

I already had a clear vision of what the finished print would look like. Unfortunately my Mum was not playing ball and against the staffs best efforts they could not persuade her to bring three of the horses back to the yard from a field nearby without giving the game away!

I had no choice but to do two separate shoots. One of the two horses at the yard and then we had to drive to the field to photograph the other three.

Since I had already decided to use a digital background the fact the location was different was not really an issue in that regard. All we had to do was ensure that in both locations the sunlight was falling on them in the same direction.

In hindsight (and what I would probably do next time) I should have taken the photo of the two as if they were a three. This would have eliminated any slight differences in the ratio of the horses I then had to rectify as best I could during editing.

Below are the images I started with and then the finished one:

Original photos used

Completed Image

If you would like to gift someone with an image like this, or you would like one for yourself, please do get in touch. I would love to hear from you 🙂