Horses at sunset, western Michigan

I spent a day in western Michigan scouting field trip locations for a photography workshop. With the day almost over, I was driving south on M-40 near Allegan when the clouds began to part and some beautiful light began to develop to the west.

I immediately started looking for something to put in the foreground to anchor the image. A windmill, a barn, an old gnarly tree. Anything! As I drove up and down the hills, half the time I couldn’t even see the sunset light. With the light in danger of fading I finally came upon three horses in a field not too far from the highway.

With no time to waste I grabbed a camera and a long zoom lens, ran up to the fence, lay down flat on the ground to get the band of sunset light directly behind the horses, metered the sunset light (without the horses), and began taking pictures. The horses were active so as they moved I would get up, move, drop back down on the ground and take more pictures.

The biggest problem was the horses were usually bunched pretty close together so their silhouettes overlapped. This created a photographic “merge”, which is pretty much a no no when you have silhouettes of multiple subjects. I needed one good moment when the horses weren’t overlapping in my viewfinder. And finally it happened. Two horses close to each other but not overlapping. I had my image.

The horses were too active and I was moving around too much to make a tripod practical. I didn’t want to miss the right moment while fiddling with a tripod. I needed an ISO setting high enough to give me a shutter speed that wouldn’t blur the images due to my own movement. Basic hand holding advice says you need a shutter speed equal to or faster than 1/focal length (1 divided by the lens focal length) for a steady image, so I needed a shutter speed around 1/300 second. However my lens has built in image stabilization which adds another 2 or 3 stops of steadiness so I could get by at 1/160 second.

It was important when I metered to point my lens at the brightest area of the light without including the horses. If the horses had been in the viewfinder when I metered, the meter would have tried to lighten up the dark horses and the sky would end up being washed out, losing all of the rich colors.

Photo Data: .Canon 5D Mark III. Canon EF 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM lens at 270 mm. 1/160 sec,  f/8,  ISO 800.