After having him on loan just under a year I was riding on the lunge with no stirrups and he slipped in the mud and landed on my leg and it broke in three places. The trip to the hospital was hilarious actually, more when I reflect on it rather than at the time, but the paramedics were just funny chaps and when I had some Gas and air I was not aware that it makes your voice sound lower, so when I was asked if it was working I said 'yeah' but completely sounded like a man! So embarassing. So anyway, this is the part where photography actually starts to make an appearance. So I was stuck in cast for an estimate 12 weeks (it did turn out to be that long in the end) so I wasn't able to ride but my friend obviously kept riding Chester and I would go to the yard to visit every so often and we'd always taken photos of eachother riding but I wasn't there to do that anymore but i'd go to the shows she competed in and i'd take photos then.
My dad came to visit at some point during that summer and he brought an olympus dslr with him (I can't remember which model) I didn't really know anything about cameras at this point but after he let me use that to take some shots of my guinea pigs and brothers I wanted one and asked if I could have 'a proper camera like yours' for my birthday that year. That's when I got my hands on my own first SLR, nikon D40x. So when I'd go to the yard i'd always try and get better photos than I did with the casio compact, because I had better equipment. That's how my interest first started, because I started to think about what I was shooting a bit more, I obviously still wasn't great at it! but i'd try and get better shots each time I saw the horses. I wanted to purely be an equine photographer at this point, I knew that's what I wanted to do with my life. I think because of the amount of time i'd spent not particularly involved with the horses because of my leg (about 6 months total) I started losing interest in them and riding so by august in 2008 I no longer had chester on loan and effectively had no ties to horses anymore.
My interest in portraiture had started picking up in the last few months being involved with horses and by the end of 2008 that's what I mostly shot, but i'd usually stick to self portraits, until I decided to ask some friends to model for me. I hadn't taken a photo of a horse in about 7 months or so when I went to see Chesters owner and her other horses and I took my camera with me, i'd had an idea to just use a horse in some portrait work, but since then I started seeing them as separate subjects again and i've also used them in other photoshoots. Over the last year i've been redeveloping my equine photo skills and set up a comission package that combines aspects of my equine and portrait work. So there's the story of how my interest in photography started, why I obsess with using horses so much and evidence that I can't write life stories for toffee!
A sample of horse portraiture and photoshoots from the last year:
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