Haley and Luke’s Equestrian Photo Session.

Going way back to my roots with this one.

It’s always a little amusing when I pull my farmboy card and shoot on a farm. People are surprised that I’m perfectly comfortable working in such an environment. My grandfather was a dairy farmer. He also had pigs and chickens. My parents also had various farm animals along the way.

It’s actually because of the farm life that I got into photography in the first place.

I got my first camera when I was eight years old. It was a Polaroid Land Camera and it was a Christmas gift from my parents. I took to it like a fish to water. My only limit was buying those packets of film. Five minutes of glory followed by days or weeks of waiting to get a new packet.

Flash forward a few years. My sister discovered horses and horse shows. This meant many, many weekends of horseshows. Days of sleeping in a truck camper followed by hours of helping her prep, watching her in her classes, and walking the horse after to cool it down.

I was bored.

My uncle took pity on me and let me borrow his Canon (yeah, I know, a Canon) AE-1 Program to play with while at the shows. That’s when the flirt became a passion. Photographing the classes, the prep, the other participants and anything else that caught my eye. The time between dropping off the film and picking up the 3×5 prints were the longest.

This is what set me on the path of learning as much as I could about the whole process of photography.

So, when my Grand-Niece Haley asked me if I would like to do a session with her and her horse Luke…hell yes.

As always the sounds, sights, and smells of a barn brought me right back to my youth. Haley knew what kind of shots she wanted so it all went smoothly. As it is with couples sessions, it was all about capturing the relationship between the two.

What we have here is the combination of two sessions. We met to get images of her riding one day followed by a more formal session two weeks later.