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Practical Horsemanship
I first saw Dan and Grant working with Monty Roberts in 2005 on one of his UK tours. They took a very understated role in supporting Monty in the demonstration. The next year I went to their first ever demonstration as Practical Horsemanship at Brackenhurst Equestrian Centre in Nottinghamshire. I was in a the audience with the biggest zoom lens I had and struggling with low light, but it was enough for me to get several really nice photos, one of which is still one of my favourite action shots. The horse in question had never had a saddle on its back before, it was very calm while it was put on and very calm after, so calm that Dan was able to ride it with in half an hour. But there was just one moment, the saddle was put on and Grant sent the horse away in the round pen and it went “What's that on my back, I wonder if I can get rid of it?” And so it tried one leap in the air to dislodge the saddle and I managed to catch that one moment.



In 2007 I was pleased to be able to be able to work closely with Practical Horsemanship on their first UK tour, I was able get my camera much closer to the round pen and ended up getting some truly amazing photographs. But the best part was that I was able to watch Dan and Grant at work over several nights and see that they truly had the welfare of the horse to the fore, they would never push a horse to perform for the audience and they would take things at the horses pace.

The challenge I found working as photographer at these demo's was that it was quite a challenging environment; low light, high speed action and no option of using a flash. This was the first outing for my Pentax ist DL2, I used an old manual focus 50mm F:1.2 lens. Over the three evenings I was with them I took 1,100 photographs. And got through 12 Duracell plus batteries before realising that the Ever Ready Lithium ones lasted so much longer (could probably done all 1100 photos on one set).

To find out more about Practical Horsemanship got to their web site at www.practicalhorsemanship.co.uk











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