Image of the Month: February 2013

I thought I would follow Magnus Lindbom‘s idea and start a wee photo of the month blog series to give a little background to a few of my personal favourite images. It’s February 2013, here goes…

Wild horses heading for water, Mongolia, June 2012

In June of 2012 my wife and I travelled by the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia. The train journey lasted 5 and a half days, and we did it in one go. It is a long trip, but we quickly fell into the meditative pace needed to happily pass hours spent watching birch trees and huge expanses of sky. Arriving in Mongolia, we joined up with a great guide who accompanied us during the next three weeks as we travelled across stepp, mountain valley and desert.

I made this image in the first week of our trip across Mongolia, as we were coming up away from the valley of the Orhon Gol, which is one of the largest rivers in Mongolia. Peering out the front window of our Russian 4-wheel drive minivan, I spotted a line of horses (there are lots of them in Mongolia…) in the distance heading straight towards us.

I asked the driver to stop, and we all got out and watched as the troop cantered steadily past us and down towards the river valley below. Despite the views of horses at every turn in Mongolia, this felt like a special moment, something about the softly patterned hills in the background that mirrored some of the beautiful patterns of fur on the horses themselves. The early morning clouds and blue sky behind framed the scene beautifully, and I frantically took photographs with a range of lenses to try and find the simplest flowing composition that matched the simple flowing beauty of the horses passing in front of us.

This was my favourite image, and I’m still quite happy with it several months on. It puts me straight back in the moment whenever I look at it, and I can immediately recall the distant sound of padding hooves.

For those interested, I made this image on a Panasonic GH2 with a 45mm Olympus prime lens.

The rest of my Mongolia photographs are in the portfolio.