I came up with this article idea after seeing a continuous flood of performance show photos and blogposts by Americans. I live in Finland and therefore am European, so my perspective differs a lot from the folk far there.
I haven't heard about any shows being held in Europe during the worldwide disaster which 2020 has been honored to mark as a synonym of. Meanwhile, Americans seem to have some activity in the model horse field, and a lot! Photo shows are a thing now. Some people blog about this stuff a lot (at least at the moment), and I can well say that I enjoy reading that and seeing all the photos about it.
What do those posts and photos usually evoke in people who are seeing them? Most of the time the reader is most likely another model horse hobbyist, so that explains half of it. According to what I've seen via the blog stuff, people inspire each other and encourage themselves to do the more or less silly photos and stories. They command each other to have fun.
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| A fun but technically so outdated photo from 2016. |
While American model horse hobbyists have been busy with performance photo show entries, tack, dolls, props and all that, also I have been sitting in my art room, doing miniature stuff. But instead of performance crafts, I've been sculpting mini clay rats, food and water bowls, and most recently I've also assembled a few model rat cages.
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| I very recently rebuilt this one. |
I have model horse tack projects in mind and I actually HAVE to make some of them soonish. I have ideas for photos. I have a lot of dolls. I have plans. I have stories in my head.
But none of that has anything to do with model horse showing. I don't do shows. But I like to make tack, put it on the horses, put dolls on the saddles, basically play with my stuff... All this just for fun, as was said in this older post.
Often, when I read those blog posts by American hobbyists, it makes me want to grab some horses, dolls and tack and do a couple setups. I want to photograph them and then blog them. I used to do all that a lot at some point, excluding the blogging part; the most important thing has always been just to have the nice setups and scenes documented so that I can see them later as well.
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| Mirrors are nice and useful, but take ah so much space. |
Then I remember that hey, I don't even have a photo studio... Anymore... And I do not have any room or place for it. I'm these people who do not lay on the floor with their toys - instead, I need a table or a shelf to place my studio box on, and then I also need some lamps and probably a tripod for my camera. I have no space or resources for any of this at the moment, and it's not going to change anytime soon. I have no idea if and when it will change, but it annoys me to no end to realize that I can't save all the ideas I have in time.
So, basically seeing those perf photos makes me both fascinated and frustrated at the same time. I'm not blaming anyone here - it was me who decided to destroy my studio box, but there were reasons to why it happened. Now getting a new photo studio depends from two things: 1. I should find a LARGE enough cardboard box (the previous one was too small) and 2. I need something to place it on top of.
I happen to own a pile of largeish cloths which I have hoarded just for model horse photography use. They take two large plastic tubs to live in. My favorite will still always be the big sand brown/creamy fabric, which can be seen in many of my photos, obviously.
I seemingly said what I wanted to... In one sentence, after all that useless blabbering.
As I just said, I lack the resources for good photos at the moment. Despite that I've assembled and documented a few modelverse scenes anyway - it just doesn't look good due to how... I've placed the models on top of a small and narrow shelf where I keep my littlebits. It happens to be black and with a white wall behind it. I can't do more than just some basic wholebody shots, and the light is too poor to allow detail shots (my camera struggles to focus). I also get physically exhausted thanks to this, because it's not even close to being ergonomic. Basically I've simply given up at trying to do good photos, and these pics turn out ugly. A white paper taped on the annoying marks doesn't help much.
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| Yes, you definitely can see a western guy riding in English tack here. I don't have any western saddles and I have no idea how to make one. The hackamore is also awful... On purpose. |
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| And here is a cat who needs clothes. Removable clothes. |
Still, I seem to have a feeling that I am going to have a new, bigger and better photo studio again someday... Meanwhile I take my ugly photos just to save some ideas for the better future.
By the way, once Braymere did a blogpost where she mentioned that simplified backgrounds are totally fine. It hit me hard, positively, because that is exactly how I have been doing my own modelverse photos for long years! And I have secretly wished that people would make it acceptable...
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| Studio photos with a simple background are my "specialty"... If I ever even had that much experience of any other form of photography! (So the specialty mention is a joke.) |
There is also more what I wanted to say. One thing which makes me feel like an outsider with model horse showing question is, that I personally have never participated in stuff like that. I've never been into competiting with other people who craft stuff similar to mine. An excuse is that I just don't understand why people would play "being better" than everyone else. I know that model horse showing is meant to be fun and not too serious and this and that, but it still is about placing higher than your fellow showers. I myself would be a bad judge, because a. I have my own really strict views and opinions about what to judge, and b. I simply wouldn't want to place just one first. I would not want to put people's creations into a bettering order.
That mention about me having strict opinions about judging is... Something I want to talk about, but maybe not here. I don't know how to word it, really. I have never judged model horse shows, and I'm not an expert with different breeds' standards, so it's not about being "too knowing" or anything, but the opposite... I just happen to be really picky about art and realism in it, and I am a total tack spy. I spy details and accuracy. I judge horse photos every time I see them, be them about real or model horses. I think, due to how I look at these photos, I would also be really unfair if I was asked to judge photos by beginners or children, who naturally can't do everything at the level where the more experiences people can do. And let me say, I'm not at that high level myself neither... But as I said, I struggle to word this thing, so I will well stop it here then. I'm afraid people will greatly misinterpret what I say.
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| So many tack fails that I can't even count... And it is quite the idea of this heavily edited photo. |
Anyway, it was good to be able to turn all these thoughts into words for once. I've been wanting to write a post like this for so long time now... More to come?
Illustrating this post was extremely difficult. Every photo I choose seems to have at least one serious flaw which I am ashamed of. I don't bother to show those in the context of good performance photos... So that is why there are so many "behind the scenes" pics.
