Shoot before you repair anything
Every fencing claim and most fencing disputes are decided by photographs taken in the first hour, and the instinct to start fixing straight away is the enemy of that evidence. However urgent the repair — and with horses loose it usually is urgent — the camera work takes three minutes and has to come first. Photograph the damage exactly as found: rails hanging as they fell, wire sprung as it sits, the gate in whatever position it was discovered. A repaired fence photographed afterwards proves only that you own a fence. If animals are at immediate risk on a road, of course secure them first and photograph as soon as the emergency allows; but where safety permits, the untouched scene is the whole value of the exercise.
The wide, the close and the scale
Work the set in a fixed order so nothing depends on remembering under stress. First, wide context shots from several paces back: the damaged stretch in the middle of its run, the field it encloses, what lies on the other side — road, neighbour's land, public footpath — because liability arguments often turn on what the fence was separating. Second, mid-range shots of each break separately, so a snapped rail and a strained corner post are each identifiable as their own event. Third, true close-ups of the failure itself: the grain of a split post, staples pulled clean out, wire ends, a hinge torn from its screws. In the close frames, lay something of known size alongside — your glove, a boot, a pen — because a photograph of broken wire cannot later prove whether the gap was ten centimetres or half a metre, and that difference matters when someone asks whether a horse pushed through or was let through.
Photograph the story, not just the fence
Damage has a cause, and the cause is usually written on the ground rather than in the timber. Photograph hoofprints and churned ground on both sides of the line, skid marks where a horse has hit or scrambled through, hair caught on wire or splinters, dung patterns that suggest how long animals were on the wrong side, and any tyre tracks, footprints or tool marks that are not yours. Take the same stretch from the far side as well: a fence that looks pushed from your field reads very differently photographed from the road, where it may be obvious that something struck it from outside. Gate hardware deserves its own frames even when the gate seems uninvolved — a bent latch or a chain hanging undone changes the whole account of how animals got out, and 'the gate looked fine' is a claim you will not be able to support a month later without the picture.
Time, notes and keeping the set usable
Make sure your phone is stamping the images with the correct date and time, and immediately add a few written notes somewhere you will keep them: when the damage was discovered, by whom, which animals were where, and what the weather had done in the previous day — a post that failed in a storm-softened field is a different claim from one that failed on dry ground. Photograph again after temporary repairs and again after the permanent fix, so the sequence runs found, secured, restored. Then file the whole set where it will actually be found in six months: KinsLe's Pet Passport keeps a pet's records together in one portable packet, and a dated damage set stored alongside the horse's other paperwork is ready to send to an insurer, a yard owner or a contractor the moment anyone asks, instead of being scattered across a camera roll under a thousand pictures of the horse himself.