Today, three horses were munching on the grass in a field across the street from where I photographed the sheep the other day. That field was empty so, inspired by the Pioneer Woman’s current photo contest, subject: Horses, I pulled over, jumped out of my car and navigated the steep drainage ditch in front of the pasture. I’m lucky that the rain has stopped because a few days ago, it was filled with water and today I didn’t have on my drainage ditch navigating boots.
Since I didn’t have access to the pasture, I was restricted to photographing the horses as they presented themselves to me, which presentation was not necessarily what one wants to look at in a horse picture. This guy finally wandered over to the fence close to me and his face was covered with flies. I got closeups with swarms of flies but those aren’t very appealing, either. I liked the composition of this picture but the sky was very washed out. Since my inspiration came from the Pioneer Woman’s weekly contest, I decided to make a few adjustments to this photo as most of the entries in her contests are altered with textures and color enhancements. I have Photoshop Elements 9, but I opted to use just the sepia adjustment and a vignette in Aperture. I actually like the results; I am reminded of the westerns from the 1940’s and 1950’s and almost expect to see Roddy McDowall come out to feed “Flicka” a carrot.
Lens at 38mm
ISO 200
f/5
1/500
White Balance set to Sunny
Sepia and vignette added