The saguaros behind this stallion are not scenery either: they're a second portrait in the same frame.

A saguaro grows only in the Sonoran Desert and nowhere else on earth. It takes something like a decade to reach an inch tall, may not flower until it's thirty-five, and typically doesn't put out its first arm until somewhere between fifty and seventy-five years old. The multi-armed giants standing behind this horse were very likely here before Arizona was a state. They are protected by law, and moving or destroying one is a serious offence.

So what you're looking at is two long-lived desert residents in one photograph, and the horse is the short-lived one. A wild stallion might see twenty years if he's lucky. The cactus behind him could see two hundred.

That's part of why I keep working this location. The desert gives you a background that doesn't just fill space. It establishes that the animal belongs to a specific place, and only this place. Put the same horse against neutral scrub and you have a picture of a horse. Put him against saguaros and you have a picture of the Sonoran Desert that happens to contain a horse.

On printing this one: you mention in the product copy that this file can go beyond six feet tall, and this is the image in the gallery I'd actually spend that on. The vertical format and the saguaro columns are built for a tall, narrow wall: a stairway, a double-height entry. Most images look merely bigger at that size; compositions with strong verticals look intended.