The Morning Run: Photographing Horses in Motion

There are a handful of things I will happily get up early in the morning for. Photographing horses in motion is at the top of that list. A good sunrise is on there too. The horses running in from pasture at Triangle X Ranch is one thing I have never once regretted doing.

If you have not seen it, here is how it goes. The sun will be rising to your back left. You stand at the fence, and you do not see anything yet, but you hear it. The gate, then a couple of seconds of nothing, then the ground starts doing something under your boots that I have never been able to describe properly. Then they come around the corner and the sun is coming up behind them and the whole thing is backlit dust and ears and legs.

It lasts maybe thirty seconds. Then they are out in the corral, and it is over, and you are standing there with your heart going and a camera that just got coated in dust.

I have been photographing horses in motion on this same run more times than I can count, and I have not gotten tired of it once.

What I actually shot this at

Nikon Z8, Tamron 150-500mm at 500mm, 1/1000 sec, f/8, ISO 7200, plus two thirds of a stop. 6:40 in the morning on May 24th.

Go ahead and react to the ISO. I will wait.

Everybody who looks at those numbers has the same two questions, so let's do them in order.

Why f/8 and not wide open

The instinct with a shot like this is to open all the way up and let the background melt. I did the opposite, and the background melted anyway.

That blur is not coming from the aperture. It is coming from 500mm of focal length and the fact that the treeline behind those horses is a long way back. At that focal length and that subject distance, f/8 throws the background out just fine. You do not need f/2.8 to get separation. You need distance and a long lens, and most people are buying fast glass to solve a problem that focal length already solved.

What f/8 buys me that wide open would not is depth. There are four horses stacked front to back in that frame. Wide open, three of them are mush and the photo is about one horse. At f/8 the ones behind are soft enough to read as distance and sharp enough to still read as horses. That stacking is the shot. I did not want to trade it for a slightly creamier background I was going to get anyway.

Why 1/1000 and not faster

I would normally want more than this on a running animal. On a horse crossing the frame I would be at 1/2000 and not thinking about it.

Head on is different. When they are coming straight at you, there is very little movement across the sensor. The body is barely traveling sideways at all. What is actually moving fast is the mane, the forelock, and the legs, and 1/1000 handles those at this distance.

Zoom into the lead horse's forelock in the full size file and it is there.

So 1/1000 was enough, and every stop faster than enough was a stop I was going to pay for somewhere else. Which brings us to the ugly number.

ISO 7200, and why I am fine with it

Here is the actual decision. It is 6:40 in the morning, the sun is barely over the treeline, I am at f/8 on a lens that opens to f/6.7 at the long end, and I want 1/1000. There is exactly one variable left. The camera is going to do whatever it has to do with ISO, and I am going to live with it.

I shoot this in manual with Auto ISO for that reason. I lock the shutter speed and the aperture because those are the two things making the photograph, and I let the ISO float because it is the one I am willing to lose. When you get seconds, you do not get to sit there rolling a thumb wheel.

Is there noise at 7200? Sure. Is it a problem? Not really. Modern Denoise is very good and the dust in this frame is hiding a multitude of sins anyway. A clean photo of four blurry horses is still a photo of four blurry horses. I would rather have the sharp one with grain in it.

If you take one thing from this post, take that. Decide which two settings are making the picture and defend them. Spend the third one.

The rest of the setup for photographing horses in motion

Exposure compensation. Plus two thirds. Shooting into low sun with dust in the air fools matrix metering every time. The meter sees all that bright haze and pulls everything down, and you end up with dark horses in a nice bright cloud. Push it up and watch your highlights. The dust can blow out a little. It is dust.

Focus. Continuous AF, animal detection on, wide area rather than a single point. A single point sounds precise and disciplined, and it will lose the lead horse the instant she drops her head.

The part nobody mentions: start focusing before they are in frame. Pick up the lead horse the second she comes around the corner and let the camera track her the whole way in. If you wait until she looks good in the viewfinder and then half press, it is already over.

Burst. High, and hold it down. Somewhere in that sequence is one frame where all four horses have their feet in a position that looks powerful, and the frames on either side of it look like they are falling over. Nobody times that by hand. Shoot the burst, find it later.

Where you stand. Get low. Not on the ground, because they are coming at you, and I am fond of my ribs, but lower than eye level. Shoot down at a running horse and it looks small. Shoot up at one, and it looks like it could go through a wall.

What I actually think about all of it

Every setting above is downstream of one decision, which is that I wanted the photo to feel like what it feels like standing at that fence. Heavy, fast, a little bit alarming, gone in a second.

There is no single right way to go about photographing horses in motion. You can shoot the same horses on the same morning and make a quiet photo, a soft photo, a wide landscape photo with tiny horses in the corner of a big field. Those are all good photos. They are just not what I was going for on this morning.

Figure out what you are actually there for, then let the settings follow. The ISO will sort itself out.