Equestrian in Fog

This action photograph of an equestrian was taken last year. The horse and rider are jumping a fence during a horse show in Lexington, Kentucky. We recently chose this image to experiment with a different background to replace the original one. It is difficult to isolate the subject at horse shows because the background is usually cluttered with tents, spectators and other assorted distractions. We created this imitation fog with Adobe Photoshop software and blended it into the horse and rider with careful masking. There was no desire to make the image appear as though it had been originally taken with this background. In fact, we added some other toning effects to the subject to give a more "edgy" appearance.

We expect to apply this idea to other action photographs where a more dramatic image can be created by eliminating a distracting background.