This easy-to-use and easy-to-understand guide teaches you how to bypass technical considerations and learn to see horses in a new lightfine-tuning your observation skills to recognize photo opportunities.

Regardless of whether you use a film, digital or video camera to shoot conformation, action or art photos, you'll benefit from chapters on choosing and controlling the background, working with natural light, communicating with the horse's handler and looking at the entire scene from the horse's perspective. You'll learn to circumvent common problems such as distortion (for example, when the horse's head looks larger than its hindquarters), distracting background objects, camera shake, sun flare and the "spaghetti approach" (the naive notion that taking lots of random pictures will result in a good one).

Groves shows how to take portraits of people and horses together, and includes tips for taking your camera on the trail. With regard to action shots, you'll learn how to adjust the shutter speed and anticipate the action in such specific events as jumping, reining, rail classes (Western pleasure, hunter hack), roping, barrel racing, team penning and dressage.

Since videos have become not only home movies but selling tools, a section is devoted to creating persuasive "moving" pictures.