Wild Horses
Photographing wild horses has been something I wanted to do for quite some time, however, I've never had the opportunity to do it. Lightchase Photography recently added this tour to their itinerary so I signed up. We started the tour out by traveling from Denver through the Rocky Mountain National Park on to Green River, Wyoming and then back to Denver, through the Snowy Range. The tour consisted of 7 photographers and our tour leader. When we got to Green River, Wyoming we met up with Green River Wild Horse Tours & Eco Safaris for the next part of our trip. Our guide, Rich Noble was very knowledgeable on the horses. As everyone knows, when you think of photographing wild horses, what you really want to photograph is the action....the fights - that classic shot of 2 stallions rearing up, challenging each other for the mares. Unfortunately, we were told from the start that fights were rare. We had 6 tours (about 4-6 hours each) scheduled over a 4 day period. Our first night, we found a group of about 15 horses or so and were able to photograph them, along with a Pronghorn antelope out on the range. It was a pretty good start. Our first morning out, turned out to be even better. We found our big herd from the night before, alone with 2 other groups. The mixture was great. Several of the stallions seemed to be looking for a fight. We had fights all around us. Our guide, Rich, indicated that this was more fights than he had seen in 2 years. We snapped away. The horses didn't seem to pay any attention to us and were running, prancing, and galloping right by us (the big roan stallion ran right by us, probably no further than 30-40 feet from the vehicle). The next few trips out, we found smaller groups, standing around grazing, and photographed them. Then our last morning out, we found the group we had started with (with 2 Pinto stallions in the group). They didn't disappoint us this morning either, providing us lots of action. We had so many fights going that people in our group were shooting different fights simultaneously! I took over 10,000 photographs and have narrowed it down to a little over 1,000 photographs (in the Expaned Collection below). I've also created a smaller gallery, with some of my favorites and some that I think others would appreciate. Both collections includes horses in action, horses standing, herds of horses, and much more. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them.