College Township — Decades ago, the Centre Daily Times ran a series of photographs titled Horses in the Snow, courtesy of staff photographer Dick Brown. I was working at the Pennsylvania Mirror then and one day published a photograph of a playground horse surrounded by snow. I wanted to title it Horses in the Snow, but changed my mind. Years later when I told Bill Welch of the CDT what I was going to do, he couldn't stop laughing. He loved the inside joke.

I've photographed lots of horses since then and I've long wondered why we are attracted to photographing horses but not to cows. My guess is that horses have graceful curvy lines whereas cows are, well, cows.

Of course, in Centre County you see a lot more cows than horses and I have stopped to photograph cows, whom I now consider cousins since there's a piece of a cow that has become my aortic valve. But the other day I saw some of Penn State's horses grazing in a field off Fox Hollow Road and conveniently there was a pull-off, and so I pulled off and took this photo.