Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG OS HSM Lens Sample Pictures

Early or late sunlight provides a warm light for your animal photography subjects. But sometimes you can do one-better. In this case, the late day sun was reflecting off of the large barn door windows. Placing the hay in the proper location is the next step to getting the animal properly lit. The reflected light then creates a strong rim light for the subject. No flash needed.

When shooting untethored horses, you sometimes need to think fast. Here, a dark horse moved behind a very relaxed horse. A relatively long lens focal length has a relatively narrow angle of view which means a relatively small area of the background is in the frame. In this case, a horse is large enough to mostly fill the frame, giving me a black background without taking any gear to the corral - or the horse to the studio.
 
How do I know the horse is relaxed? The bottom lip is hanging low and is slightly open. Perhaps we need to learn from the horse - but probably should not use this practice when in public.

I spend a lot of time a track and field meets – and I'm always looking for different perspectives to capture. For this shot, I was sitting on the track-side turk in a position so that the runners would be facing the sun with the stands in the background.
 
The Canon 1D X, firing at 12fps, gave me a variety of subject positions to choose from. Including this floating-in-air frame.

I liked the lines and colors of this palomino horses' tail with the lines of the ground, grass, fence and barn in the background.

OK, before someone corrects me (my daughter to be specific), the horse color is really "chestnut". Brown just sounds more common to me.
 
This image represents the framing of the Sigma 70-200 OS's about-minimum focus distance on a full frame format DSL camera. The magnification shown here is (or is very close to) 0.13x.

A determined runner approaches the finish line - with competitors close behind. Those competitors are not in the frame, but their shadows tell the rest of this story.
 
There is often more than one right way to frame a shot. In this case, I chose the tighter framing with a stronger background blur. I could alternatively zoomed the 70-200 OS to a wider focal length and captured the competitors in the frame.

No, that is not natural curl. This palomino quarter horse had its mane braided. The curls were the result.
 
I liked the pattern of long curls against the shorter coat of hair. Depth of field is shallow at the focal length and focus distance, so I aligned the plane of focus against the horse's neck as best I could for this shot.

That is a very big, hairy nose. Fortunately, it is a horse nose that is supposed to be big. The out of focus lines of the horse's body and jaw line draw the viewer's eye to the in-focus, in-your-face, nose.

This sample picture shows what 70mm looks like when used on a full frame DSLR camera.

Our eyes are drawn to areas of strong contrast in an image. In this case, our eyes are drawn to the horse's eye. Most photographic rules can be regularly broken, but one rule I seldom break is that the subject's eye must be in focus.
 
Notice the shallow depth of field in this image. Even though an f/8 aperture was used, the 200mm focal length used at this relatively short distance leaves only a thin slice of this image in focus.

A nearly-set sun casts the last of its warm light on this quarterhorse mare. As I've been saying, the eyes must be in focus.