Thanks to technology, it’s now possible to invite a horse into your living room, without inflicting the indignity of asking him/her/it to remove those muddy shoes.
Corporate and private clients of a thriving Calgary company known as HorseSource Ltd. do it every day.
By stepping through the Internet’s magic door, photo editors from newspapers, equestrian Web sites and international horse journals such as Jump, L’Eperon or Centauro enter a virtual gallery as vast as the Louvre — but a tad more specialized.
You want horses? How about stud show horses, from Abdullah to Zapateado?
Eventing horses? Polo ponies? Rodeo cayuses?
For HorseSource founders Peter and Jean Llewellyn, the ‘e’ in e-commerce stands for “equine.” And this is one dot-com enterprise which isn’t bound for the glue factory anytime soon.
The Llewellyns’ worldwide client roster pays subscription fees for the privilege of logging on to the site — www.horsesourceltd.com — and browsing hundreds of thousands of low-resolution horse thumbnails, no charge.
A password then enables them to download publication-quality images of specific horse/rider tandems, for use in their glossy photo mags.
Others log on for reasons of their own. One wealthy fan obsessively orders prints of every picture he can snag of a certain foxy dressage rider. “One-stop shopping,” smiled Jean.
During the Sydney Olympics, where Peter served as official photographer for the International Equestrian Federation, HorseSource clients greedily downloaded 40-50 digital images daily, each posted within minutes of an event’s conclusion. Meanwhile, Jean, one of the planet’s best-known equestrian journalists, was madly filing caption info — as well as reporting the Games for British papers.
The equestrian world is fascinating, arcane, clannish, ultra-specialized and, well . . . generally rich. And it’s provided the Llewellyns with a robust living since they stumbled into it 20 years ago.
Peter covered Premier League soccer, World Cup skiing and other sports for several of the big U.K. dailies, including the Times and Daily Telegraph.
Assigned to cover his first-ever horse show — the prestigious Badminton trials — Llewellyn’s work caught the eye of Whitbread Breweries, the major sponsor.
“They wanted a picture of a particular rider, riding a horse called Priceless. She had to be riding it through the lake, and it had to have the Whitbread sign in the background,” Peter laughed.
Oddly enough, he had one. Whitbread was so impressed, the company hired him.
Eventually, he landed similar deals with other sponsors and, in 1990, the Llewellyns did a Peter Mayles — they moved to a 300-year-old farmhouse, near Lyon, France.
“The idea was, I’d photograph equestrian in summer, and World Cup skiing in winter,” Peter said. But a horse is a jealous master. Peter quit the ski circuit after a season or two and the couple set out, hand-in-hand, down life’s bridle path.
For years, they herded their three dogs into the family caravan and motored to about 40 week-long shows annually — including Calgary’s Spruce Meadows Masters — often awakening in a different country each week.
They set up the Web site in France — using a server provided by CadVision of Calgary.
“We had already applied to come to Calgary as immigrants, so from the beginning we were using CadVision as an external server,” said Llewellyn.
Meanwhile, nurturing a business in socialist France — world capital of red tape, bungling and bureaucratic snafus — had begun to wear on the couple’s nerves. Hence, their 1999 relocation to southeast Calgary.
Business has been so brisk the Llewellyns now feel free to ease down from the saddle from time to time. Their latest venture is a self-published book, Trail Riding in Rocky Mountain Country, on the stands in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, a start-up Web site (www.split-seconds.com), modelled on the equestrian site, will market digital images of Peter’s wildlife photos, a new passion.
But the horse site remains the meal ticket.
A graphic-based site serving about 50 megabytes of information a day, www.horsesourceltd.com offers access to a database of 500,000 horse photographs.
Believed to be the world’s largest, it dates back to the days of Federico Caprilli, an 1890s-era Italian cavalryman and the godfather of show jumping. As equestrian Web sites go — and there are thousands — it’s a dark-horse contender for best of show.
Web Watch:
www.horsesourceltd.com
