It’s a dramatic scene as the Middleton’s Miles Seston and top eventer Ben Hobday jump a solid five bar gate in complete sync during a day out near Bugthorpe in Yorkshire. Worthy of a cover perhaps.
Introduction
Periodically, during the hunting season between October and March, Horse & Hound commissions shoots with hunts around the country and photographers are booked accordingly, often based on geography.
You can view the full set of images submitted for the commission here. The article in the magazine spanned about six pages.
Sometimes these shoots include a cover photo in the brief but often they don’t. I reckon there is nearly always a chance of a cover if there is a suitable shot.
On this occasion a cover was requested, if a suitable shot presented itself.
The style for these shoot days is largely reportage, following the natural sequence of the day, but the brief might also include specific details if the journalist writing up the article was planning to mention particular things.
Portraits of people are essential. The article always mentions important roles within the hunt and the photographer must capture as many of these people as possible during the day.
This commission was a little unusual because, although my days with a hunt normally coincide with the journalist attending, they normally don’t want their picture included. For this job the focus of the day was going to be Ben Hobday, so his image would feature heavily.
A day with the Middleton
I parked at Miles Seston’s yard, close to the meet, in time to capture preparations and some hound portraits. Then when people began arriving for the meet it was important for me to record as many different people and groups of people as possible, both mounted and on foot. I would work with Miles later to get everyone’s name.
After the meet I was given specific directions to a series of decent hedges which would hopefully (they did) give me some action shots for the article. I could see hounds in the distance and managed to capture some nice Yorkshire landscapes before the field arrived where I was.
When they did I tried to keep the images more editorial, taking them from head-on to the horse and rider so that face were visible and, with the commission in mind, the were more suitable for cover images if used for this.
The day continued and gave me opportunities for photos of hounds, huntsman, mounted and foot followers. When jumps were available I was generally sent ahead to make sure I was on the landing side when the field jumped them.
Some of the hunting days give me more than others in the way of content and this was a really good one. I had lots of people shots, hound shots, jumping and landscapes, but nothing really made me think it was a likely cover.
I needn’t have worried.
As the hounds paused in the early afternoon Miles Seston called me over and motioned to a post and rail fence with a gate at the top of it.
“The field will probably jump the post and rail,” he told me, “but Ben and I have decided we are going to jump that gate together. That will give you your cover!”
I agreed it would make a great shot if they could do it, but jumping anything completely in sync with the person next to you is difficult, let alone a big five bar gate.
Consumate professionals they were, though, and achieved what they described with their first attempt, absolutely side-by-side and synchronised. I really couldn’t believe it.
The day continued and I probably packed up at around five, knowing I had a three-hour journey home.
Workflow
When I get home from these shoots I offload the images immediately. Everything gets ingested onto an external “work” SSD drive on my desk with the correct metadata for the day added at that stage by Photo Mechanic. At that stage I won’t start editing but because the images are now all on the SSD they will also be backed up to both an external HDD and Backblaze in the Cloud.
I edited and captioned the images over the next few days and when I sent them to the picture desk at Horse & Hound I did so without any comment about cover shots. I was interested to see what they thought. Sure enough the gate shot was selected and when the magazine came out a couple of months later – yes this is typical but not always the case – a few friends playfully accused me of photoshopping two different images together.
No , I said, I think you know Ben well enough to know that he did that as you see it.
