Horse photography with black backgrounds

I spent a few minutes at the end of a riding lesson with my mom and a friend of ours trying out a black background technique for horse photography.

The concept is fairly simple – if you can have your horse standing in light, and their background in shadow, then you can work in lightroom with the RAW file and essentially edit the backgroud to completely black. This allows you to isolate your subject and focus on some of the details in the horse, without being distracted by anything in the background!

I love how these came out. Especially using my Canon R5, you are able to pull so many details off of the horse’s face.

The image is literally larger than life!!

The main area I’m noticing could use some improvement is some of the shadows are quite harsh. I was working with almost direct sunlight – which made the shadows really stand out in some cases! I was able to brighten them up a bit with post work, but I am hoping to try this technique again on an overcast day, to soften some of those shadows and make them less noticeable!