By Donald H. Harrison
DEL MAR, California – On the second floor of the Grandstand East building at the San Diego County Fair, where the entries in the photography contest are displayed, visitors will see in a prominent position “Partners,” a photo made by Leah Horstman that received the most votes from fair goers last year as their favorite photo of all.
It pictures Jester, a police dog which had been stabbed by a fleeing suspect, being hugged by its handler, El Cajon “SWAT team” Police Officer Randall Gray. The attack on Jester, a Belgian Malinois that eventually recovered from its wounds, had been very much in the news prior to last year’s Fair, and that may have been the reason why the photograph aroused such a sympathetic response, Horstman suggested modestly.
After the dog’s recovery, Gray wanted to have photos of them together, and the El Cajon Police Department’s media relations officer, Amanda Still, said that Horstman, who is her mother, could do it. After taking some requested photos outside the warehouse of Professional’s Choice, where Horstman serves as director of manufacturing and warehousing, Horstman asked if Jester and Gray would accompany her inside the warehouse. Located near Gillespie Field, the warehouse is stocked with all kinds of equipment for horses except saddles. Horstman led them through the leather bits, reins, straps, boots, saddle pads, band blankets, and other accessories to a spot where the lighting would be just right, then composed the photo showing the obvious affection between these two partners.
It was not the first time that Horstman, a member of San Diego’s Jewish community, had won a major honor at the San Diego County Fair, which previously was known as the Del Mar Fair. In 2019, her “Ice Climber” won the “Best of Show” honor, which is the fair’s top award for photographers.
Horstman took the photo near Banff, Alberta, at Johnston Canyon, which is a popular tourist destination in summer but where she saw only two people during a winter visit. She hiked up through the back of the canyon to the upper falls – a dangerous, icy journey for which she had to use crampons. “When I got there, there were two guys climbing the frozen waterfall from bottom to top.” For a few seconds, she felt disappointed that humans were on the remarkable scene. Then she realized that this fellow wearing a red jacket gave an idea of the scale of the place and lent the photo perspective. Speaking at a workshop at the fair on Saturday evening, June 10, she said that focusing on one man in the photo changed the picture “from a snapshot to storytelling – that image without him would have been just a snapshot, but now it becomes an entire story of danger, excitement and intrigue.”
Winning “Best of Show” that year was among Horstman’s “trilogy of big moments.”
Another came in 2016 when she was hiking along the banks of the Merced River at sunrise and came across “this most stunning scene with fresh powdered snow everywhere,” she recalled. “People always ask, ‘What is your favorite shot?’ and many photographers will answer ‘Oh, it’s the one I have yet to take,’ but if I’m really being honest that shot [shown at top of this story] to this day is my favorite. That was the moment I think I realized that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
Titled “X’mas on the Merced,” Horstman entered it into Nature Conservancy’s photography contest. “That year they had 72,000 entries, all done online, and they whittled it down into the top 100. I knew I made it into the top 100—that was such an honor. The Nature Conservancy is a worldwide organization, and I will never forget the email that said that my image ‘Xmas on the Merced’ had won the grand prize as photo of the year. I guess of all my accomplishments that one will probably stand out as the biggest, at least to date.”
The third photo in Horstman’s “trilogy of big moments” came in 2017 when she went to a Gainesville, Texas, working ranch to photograph some Professional’s Choice products in use. After the work was done, “I went out to the pasture at sunset” to take a photograph of a longhorn steer. She named the photograph “Quintessential Texas” and loaded it onto a portal that National Geographic made available for outside photographers to share their work. “I will never forget this moment: It was May 18th of 2018 and I was driving home from Los Angeles and I got a phone call from National Geographic. They said they had seen my photo and they were doing a piece on the history of Texas. They wanted to know if they could use my photo in National Geographic. And I said, ‘Well, let me think about it for a minute—Okay!’ So that was a pretty big honor.”
This year at the San Diego County Fair, Horstman submitted 20 online photos for the Tier One phase of the competition. Of these, 15 were selected to advance to Tier Two, meaning they would be exhibited at the Fair. And from these 15, two won first place awards, signified by blue ribbons, in their categories; another was awarded a second place, yet another a third place, nine won honorable mentions, and two did not place.
In our interview, Horstman noted that “the San Diego International Photography Exhibition is the largest printed, judged competition in North America. It is a huge honor to do well in this competition. Most photography competitions are just done online. Very few require you to have your work printed. There is a huge difference between that and just having a nice-looking image online because online images are backlit from your computer, so they all look bright, shiny, and pretty. It is a whole other animal when you have to print your work to be displayed. It is not as easy as people may believe.”
“Autumn Mirror” was one of her first-place photos this year. Along with Bella, her Australian Cattle Dog (a Queensland Heeler), who “is my travel companion and goes with me on every domestic backpacking and car-camping trip I do,” Horstman traveled to “Intake Two,” a lake in the Sierras near Bishop, California. “I was up there to shoot Fall colors,” she said. The photograph was entered in the “Fall” subcategory of Nature photography.
“The Cowboys” was the other first-place winner. “That was the one that won in the Family Moments category,” Horstman said. “It was taken in South Dakota on a trip that I was doing for work. We were out there shooting a branding of cattle – basically I was shooting our products on horses during a branding. It shows a father and his two sons on horses taken at sunset – a really cool shot.”
Horstman had her bat mitzvah and confirmation at Tifereth Israel Synagogue. I asked her how she got interested in photography and she gave credit to her father, Ken Reifman, and to her graphics art teacher Edward Schaffroth at Patrick Henry High School, from which she graduated in 1982 and went on to study criminal justice and psychology at San Diego State University.
“Dad was always into photography, and he really encouraged my doing it with him,” Horstman said. “It was the one thing that we could do together. He would take me to Seaport Village and other places just so I could shoot. Like some kids play catch in the backyard with their dads, with a baseball or whatever, that was our thing. It was something that my brother and sister weren’t into, so it was my special time with my dad.”
At Patrick Henry High School, Shaffroth “was a phenomenal teacher, and that was a course when everything was shot on 35-millimeter film, and we had dark rooms and negatives. He made it fun, and because he liked my work, he really encouraged me. He really brought out the creativity in me. I learned that when you are enlarging images you can dodge and burn.”
A course requirement was to print a black and white photograph and enter it into the photography contest at the Del Mar Fair (as it was called back in 1981). “I remember having an image of a seagull. My dad had bought for me a star filter because that was what I wanted for my birthday. I literally shot everything with a star filter on my camera, and so the water behind the seagull had all these sparkling stars and that image took a third place in the high school competition.”
In 1982, when she was in the 12th grade, the future outdoorswoman went on a week-long trip sponsored by Patrick Henry’s Yosemite Club and “I took my camera, and I took a ton of pictures while I was there. My first published photograph was a picture of Half Dome in Yosemite,” which was published in the school’s newspaper, The Patriot Press. “Seeing my image printed and my name printed, it was really cool and really fun.”
While in college, Horstman’s attention was drawn to horses. Subsequently, “the horse lifestyle really took over my life where I bought my first quarter horse and then I got into competing . I got into cutting and reining from my early 20s until probably 2014, so for quite a few years [nearly three decades] I was just doing the horse thing, competing at very high levels. I actually went to a world competition, and was reserve world champion, and the Pacific Coast champion. I did really well with it, and though I had my camera with me, the horse thing was number one in my life obviously along with my family. And then in 2012 several things happened, and I realized I would have to give up the horse life. Being a single mom—horses are very expensive financially—and then I also got sick in 2012. So, in 2013, I ended up selling all my horses, truck, trailer, everything.
“I remember spending a weekend with my mom and dad and being kind of low,” she related. “When you are in the horse world it is life consuming. It is competing, and traveling, and competing. Finding myself with all this free time on my hands with nothing to do, what was I to do for the rest of my life? Dad said, ‘Why don’t you pick your camera back up?’ and at that point I said, ‘you know I think I would really enjoy that.’”
Over the previous 30 years, however, photography had changed; “everything was now digital.” Horstman decided to go to night school for two semesters and take classes in Photoshop.
In 2014, she entered two images into the photography exhibit at the San Diego County Fair. One she cannot even remember, and the other was “a half bird, I don’t even know what I was thinking. I thought it was the greatest shot in the world. I entered them in Tier One, and they didn’t even advance to Tier Two.”
Undeterred, she went to the photography exhibition that year at the fair and studied the many photographs there. “I was just blown away by what digital photography had become,” she said. “There are some phenomenal photographers in the San Diego area. I remember I was like a little kid in the candy store. I knew right then that I needed to get better. I wanted to get better, I wanted to learn what these people knew. I guess I did so by shooting anything and everything. I took a few more lessons with private individuals. I started with Instagram, found photographers whose images I liked, and started emailing people and asking questions. I am not a shy person so I learned as much as I could and immersed myself back into it.”
In 2015, she entered some more images and three of them won honorable mentions, “so I knew I was on the right track.”
Then came 2016, the year that she visited the Merced River. It was the year that her photography began winning acclaim.
Horstman uses three Canon cameras and four different lenses, ranging from 16-millimeters to 400-millimeters. In addition to her nature photography, she photographs concerts in San Diego and Los Angeles, and accepts commercial assignments via her website.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com