For my photo tour in the south of France to shoot the beautiful white horses of the Camargue, I set up a special session with exquisite horses in an indoor arena. My favorite was a black Lusitano horse from Spain. One would think that a black horse in a very dark indoor environment wouldn’t photograph well, but the opposite was true. With dramatic stage lighting that was already in place, the lines of the horse looked phenomenal.
To expose for this black on black situation, I simply took a first test shot and studied the image on the LCD monitor on the back of my camera. I then tweaked the exposure using the exposure compensation feature until I liked what I saw. I had to raise the ISO to 2500 to get a fast enough shutter speed (1/200th in this case), but I love the image. I minimized the digital noise with Nik Software’s Define 2.0.
The lens I used was a 24-105mm, and I shot wide open using f/4.