On the Run
Animals, domestic or wild, don’t take direction very well. They do what they want to do and the photographer has to capture the moment when the opportunity arises. The moment passes so fast that if you are not ready the opportunity will be gone.
The image of the running horse was captured at the right moment. The animal was in at play, racing around the field. If the photographer had waited one second more they may not have gotten the shot. There is good action in this composition; two legs are off the ground while a cloud of dust indicated that the horse is moving fast across the arena.
One of the rules in photographing a moving subject is to leave room in front of the subject to give space for it to move into. This composition breaks this rule leaving only a small amount of area. However I think this layout works quite well perhaps because the horse seems to be making a turn to the left.
I also like the soft high key background. This gives a dream like quality to the photograph.
Click on Image 
July 14th, 2008 at 7:21 am
This is a wonderful shot of a horse in action. I like the composition and the way of building a 45 degree angel with the horse. You can see on the vertical poll in the back that the shot is not absolutely straight, but I think that the angle of the horse is much more important. It almost looks like to me as the photographer used an Orton effect or something similar with a partial selective focus in the post processing. Overall excellent work – congratulations!
July 14th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Thank you James and Mr. Lehnerer for your comments about my photograph. Out of 160 shots I took of this horse, this is the best one that I got from him. He was in a small paddock and construction was going on near him which was causing him to run around the paddock. I took advantage of this opporunity to photograph him in motion. I love seeing horses in motion. They are such beautiful creatures.
I pulled this photograph into Photoshop Elements 6 and did some sharpening, lighting, and added a yellow filter. The last thing I used was neat image to smooth everything out.