Horses can't be much harder than kids, right?

I love being a photographer.  I'm also a mother of 4 children.  Before my divorce, I would shoot somewhat sparingly, making sure I was helping support our family, but ensuring I was a mom first.  After the divorce, I have felt pressure on my shoulders to support my family like I never felt before.  All of the things I took for granted, cash flow, bookkeeping, book reading, bill paying, spare time, (what's spare time anymore?) etc, are now things that weigh on my mind and shoulders constantly.  As a self employed photographer who does this full time to support my family, when opportunity arises, you take it.  You take it, and you do your very best, and you are grateful beyond words for every single job that comes your way.  When a dear client called me and told me she wanted to make a collage for her office wall of her horses, I thought, piece of cake.  I've seen LOTS of horse pictures, lots of beautiful, amazing artistic horse pictures.  They can't be that hard to take, right?  I browsed pinterest, found the ones I loved and wanted to try to capture, and went in with confidence.

We live in Parker County TX, the cutting horse capital of the world.  They are huge magnificent beasts, and my friend has two very young cutting horses.  One is 2 years old, and the other is 3 months old.  I figured we would offer them some grass and some feed and snap away!  After an hour of chasing around this beautiful horse that literally was non-stop movement, and praying that I got at least 6 pictures that were in focus, I found myself missing that silly 2 year old session, because although they can be crazy, at least I can hold their attention in 20 second bursts by making ridiculous faces and noises and make them laugh.  I only need 1/4000 of a second to get a good shot.  Seems easy.  Turns out, it isn't.  I've heard shooting horses is one of the hardest things.  I now have such a huge respect for those pinterest pictures that I completely under estimated!  We had fun shooting these horses, and next time I'm bringing sugar cubes or something.  Isn't that what worked on the black stallion?!

Hoping we got at least 6-9 pictures that my client will love to see everyday!  This was a lot of fun, especially seeing the little little horses playing and biting each other.  Can't wait for my next horse shoot, this time with pockets of sugar cubes.