An enormous bronze sculpture of a horse’s head sits astride a sidewalk in the heart of Santa Fe, promoting an exhibition of bronze sculpture that was on display in an adjacent museum. I attempted first to work with its staggering scale incongruity, but the head was so large that my frame could only embrace it from a distance. And when I moved back far enough to make it fit my frame, I was forced to include much irrelevant distracting clutter – a mailbox, a street sign, and busy backgrounds. I decided to take a different approach –forgetting about dealing with its great size, and instead expressing its beauty and power as a work of art. The key to such a task is abstraction. I had to include less in order to say more. My initial attempts at abstraction failed because the light was flat, giving the bronze a uniform, boring coloration. I returned to this subject again the next day in the very early morning, when the interplay of light and shadow and the golden color of the light combined to help me interpret the bronze head as glittering precious metal. Using a long telephoto to narrow the zone of focus, and spot metering the subject to expose for the highlights along the side of the horses face, I bring out the line of the facial muscles and arteries, as well as the detail on the bridle. The bared teeth, a huge nostril, and a glaring eye are all in deep shadow. They are there but not there, a tease for the viewers imagination. I also framed the horizontal shape of the head as a vertical, going against the grain to create energy and tension in the process. Eventually, this head will be placed on a body as part of one of the largest equine sculptures ever made. But for now it remains a simple abstraction, an attempt to define the essence of the sculptor’s art and allow it to work on the imagination of the viewer.