ARTIST RESEARCH | oksphotography

DIARY

Artist Research: Andy Biggar and Emily Hancock

Artist 2: Emily Hancock

Emily Hancock is a horse photographer renowned for her beautiful photography. She is also a highly regarded photography trainer who enjoys passing on her skill and expertise to younger, less experienced photographers. Her most recent equine series has been awarded by the British Institute of Photography and was featured on the BBC. She is one of the UK's leading equine photographers, photographing many stars of the equestrian world such as Olympic British dressage rider and winner of two gold medals, Charlotte Dujardin.

The intentional variation of lighting in her images is magnificent. Counterpoint is used very effectively in some of her images, lighting the background of an image to make the shape of the horse darker and more prominent. This is also used in the image without people (shown below) - the surroundings are made very dark so that the lighting illuminates the detail and colour of the horse in the centre. I really like this because you can see the fine details of the horse such as his veins and muscles.

Her work is shown below.

In my interpretation of her work, I wanted to capture the same bond between people and animals that she manages to capture. I had quite a difficult lighting scene to work with, and I found I quite often had to adjust my ISO or use my flash due to the darkness of the stables. My favourite of the images shown below is the portrait because of its humour. I also thought the dark background exposed the horse's features very well. I used a wide aperture to blur the horse's head and focus in on his teeth and mouth, including their colour and detail, as this made the photograph more interesting.

Although in my other two images (above and below) I was aiming for a similar product, I think they both portray something different. The above image shows the joy the horse brings the girl. The photo follows rule of thirds successfullt and, even thought the girl and the horse is the focus of the image, the tree and stable create very nice backgrounds/foregrounds. The image below shows the peace and ease the horse feels around his owner. I like this image because it shows the closeness between the two of them.

Similarly to what I did for my dog photoshoot, after focusing specifically on the relationship between owners and horses and techniques such as counterpoint, I took many more general photos as practice for the future.

Artist 1: Andy Biggar

Andy Biggar is an incredibly passionate dog photographer based in South Chesire, England. He has travelled all over the UK, Italy, Denmark, the USA, Abu Dhabi and many other places for his work. Unlike other photographers, he only photographs dogs and their families. Over the last five years of his career he has photographed thousands of dogs of different breeds and has developed a great understanding for how dogs react to certain situations and how to get the best out of them in front of the camera.

Andy Biggar takes a range of different photographs such as portraits, action and macro shots. I personally like the macro shots of dog's eyes because they show the gentle nature of the dogs and the reflection of the photographer in the pupil. Biggar has used a wide aperture to blur the background of the dog's head, which draws the focus in on the dog's eye. Similarly, he used this in his portraits to focuson the dog's body and detail of his head.

I think Biggar's photographs of dogs are endearing. His use of cropping adds to the quality of the images as it means the image is very focused on the dog and not his surroundings. Some of his square portraits are brilliant as the cropping has framed the dog's head or body shape. I love the use of colour in his work as he includes a variety of black and white shots but also highly saturated images which show of the dog's markings and hair.

In my interpretation of his work, I experimented with different photo sizes and shapes as seen in Biggar's photographs - one portrait, one landscape and one square photo.

My favourite of the three is definitely the square photo as it framed the dog very well. While editing, I had increased the highlight and exposure of the background of the image as the dog really stood out against a white background. The portrait photo was more natural than most of Biggar's photographs. Although I did not take any action shots of the dog running or jumping, this photo was similar to them as the dog was moving and rolling. I really liked the landscape photo as it captured the attention and interest the dog was showing. I also liked the contrast between dog and background, created by decreasing the saturation of the background. This was a different method to focus the image in on the dog other than my normal method of blurring the background. After focusing specifically on photo sizes and shapes, I went on to taking more generalised photographs of dogs as practice before moving on with my topic.