The Animals That See Through You.
I'm sitting in my car. Engine off. Keys still in my hand. I can see the yard from here. The client is already outside, waiting, doing that thing people do when they're trying to look relaxed and not quite managing it. The horse is in the field beyond. Head up, ears forward. Already watching.
Here's the thing. I am not nervous about the horse. I have never once sat in my car worrying about the animal. The animal I can read. The animal I understand. The animal will tell me exactly what it needs without a single word exchanged between us. The person by the gate is a different matter entirely. Every shoot starts like this. Not with the technical preparation, not with the equipment check, but with this quiet moment in the car where I talk myself into getting out of it.
What Humans Miss
I am nervous before every single shoot. Not cripplingly. Not in a way that stops me functioning. But it's there. The familiar tightening before I get out of the car. The awareness that I'm about to meet someone new and that the next few hours depend partly on whether we can make each other comfortable. I push it down. My clients don't see it because that's a me problem, not a them problem. But here is where it gets interesting. The humans don't notice. The animals always do.
People are surprisingly bad at reading each other. We pick up on the obvious; crossed arms, raised voices, the face someone makes when they're trying not to cry. But the subtler signals? Most people miss those. Human interaction runs on other channels. Words. Context. Social convention. My clients don't know me well enough to recognise what my anxious behaviour actually looks like. They've never seen me calm, so they have no baseline to measure against. Whatever I'm doing when I'm nervous, slightly more focused, slightly quieter, paying more attention to my own movements than usual. To them, that's just what I'm like. Which is, frankly, enormously helpful. Most clients bring someone with them. A friend, a partner, someone who can make the whole thing feel safer. It helps them. But it helps me too. Their nerves help cover mine. We're both performing calm. Both doing that very human thing of presenting a version of ourselves that looks more together than we actually feel. We are, genuinely, equal in this. I just hide it better because I've had more practice.
What Animals Don't Miss
Animals are not running that social contract. They didn't sign up to politely accept your performance of calm and pretend they can't see straight through it. They read body language the way we read text. Fluently, quickly, without effort. The tension in your shoulders. The way you're holding your breath without realising it. The slight stiffness in how you move when you're trying to move carefully. The inconsistency between the slow, deliberate movements you're performing and the elevated heart rate underneath them. They notice all of it. And they respond to what they notice, not what you intend. A horse that senses tension doesn't think "she seems nervous, but she's a professional, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt." It just responds to the tension. No judgment. No negotiation. Just response. You cannot explain yourself. You cannot say "I know I seem tense but I'm actually fine, it's just this equipment situation I'm managing." They don't care about the equipment situation. They care about the tension. The tension is the information. Everything else is noise.
Why I Talk To Them
Here's the confession that sits underneath all of this. I talk to animals on shoots. Not in a performative way. Not for the client's benefit. I talk to them because it helps me. When I'm waiting for a horse to settle, when I'm giving a dog time to decide I'm not a threat, when I'm standing quietly at the edge of a field letting whatever animal is there get used to my presence, I talk. Quietly. Calmly. About nothing in particular. And in the process of making my voice calm, my body follows. The breathing slows. The shoulders drop. The held tension releases gradually, because you cannot speak calmly while your body is still braced.
I discovered this accidentally. I have always been more comfortable talking to the animal. And in the process of calming them, I was calming myself. The animal was simply the excuse to do something I needed to do anyway. There is a particular irony in this. I am nervous before every shoot because of the human. And I manage those nerves by talking to the animal. The human, who cannot see through me, is the source of the anxiety. The animal, who sees everything, is the cure for it.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
I've been bitten. Kicked. Had things thrown at me by animals who found me an inconvenience. None of this is personal. When an animal reacts badly, it isn't a judgment. It's information. Something in how I was moving, or where I was positioned, triggered a response I hadn't seen coming because I hadn't been paying the right kind of attention. There was a moment early in my career where I got the approach badly wrong. A dog I'd been told was easy. Friendly but stubborn. Good with people. I took that at face value and moved too quickly, too confidently, with not enough patience. The dog told me clearly and immediately that I'd misjudged the situation. I won't go into detail. I was left bleeding, but my pride took the worst of it. What I remember most isn't the physical part. It's the owner's face. That particular expression of someone trying to be diplomatic about the fact that you've just made a mistake they could see coming from miles away. Getting it right teaches you what works. Getting it wrong teaches you what you'd stopped noticing. The overconfidence. The assumptions. The moments when you thought you were reading the situation and were actually just projecting onto it.
The Privilege
Being trusted by an animal that can see straight through you is a different kind of trust than anything a human can offer. Humans trust each other with all sorts of gaps and goodwill. We give each other the benefit of the doubt. We extend faith across the things we can't verify. Which is generous, and necessary, and very human.
But an animal's trust is earned without any of that scaffolding. No benefit of the doubt. No social obligation to be polite to the person with the camera. They have access to information about you that you don't have about yourself. The stress you're holding that you've stopped noticing, the hesitation underneath the confident movement, the genuine warmth you feel toward them that you couldn't fake even if you tried. They read all of it. And they make a decision.
When a nervous horse finally decides to come close, when a wary dog relaxes enough to just exist in the same space as you. That is a verdict based on more evidence than most humans ever gather about each other. They've assessed everything about you that you can't control. And they decided you were worth trusting.
I don't take that lightly. Not once, in all the years of doing this work. Because they didn't have to. Nothing required them to. They just decided.
Listen to Episode Eleven: The Animals That See Through You →
The full story, told properly. Including the parts that don't make me look good.
New episodes every week • Follow along: TikTok | YouTube
Want to work together? I'm currently booking sessions for 2026. If you're looking for countryside photography that captures reality rather than performance, let's talk.