My "Thank You" Calendar

[rpcrowe]

I am doing a calendar to present to the ten or so volunteers who are very active in getting our Maltese Rescue California organization off the ground. They have worked very hard and this is just a personal thank you...

Each month will contain a picture of one of our rescue dogs. Some months will have themes like March (St. Patrick's Day), April (Easter), July (Fourth of July), October (Halloween), November (Thanksgiving) and December (Christmas). The other six months will have just cute pictures of our dogs and puppies. Although I have enough images (even themed images) to complete the calendar, I want to make sure that the dogs that I feature are recent Maltese Rescue California dogs so the volunteers will recognize them. That means shooting the themed images now. I have plenty of recent general purpose rescue pictures.

I shot the November and December images today, Judy has enough holiday decorations stored in our garage to do the other four months of themed pictures. Here are my candidates for November and December.

November: Micca - Shih Tsu

December: Liberty - Maltipoo


The back page of the calendar will have a thumbnail of each dog and a mini story of the dog...

[Colin Southern]

Great stuff Richard.

Any scope for selling it as a commercial product with all proceeds going towards your rescue efforts?

[Mike Buckley]

Agree with Colin on both of his points

[Donald]

Agree with Colin on both of his points

Indeed. Significant commercial potential, I would have thought. For a 2015 calendar if not for 2014.

[Mike Buckley]

It's definitely too late to bring a 2014 calendar to market intended for wide distribution. It could perhaps work for 2014 for the relatively few participants in the rescue organization.

[rpcrowe]

Great idea about the calendar my friends...

I will need to hurry and finish the 4-themed images I have left. My wife is at a rescue event in Palm Springs. CA this weekend. She may or may not stay overnight at a friend's house there, depending on how many of our dogs get adopted. Last year, she took seven dogs to the event and six were adopted by noon on Saturday. We have a staff of our volunteers there to check references and do home visits for the adopted dogs. She is taking 5-dogs to this event and our other volunteer fosters are bringing more dogs. I don't know ow many total dogs they will have here...

I did this poster to put up in our tent next to our donation jar...



When my wife arrives home, we will break out the stored holiday decorations and shoot the rest of the themed images. I always like to have a second person available when shooting portraits of my dogs. We use a thin show-lead to keep the dog in place and I clone out the lead for the final image...

I will be pricing calendars in my spare time. I prefer to buy individually or in small quantities for this year's issue, even though the prices that way are more expensive. That is because if we have to eat the price of a couple unsold calendars, it might really cut into any profit.

Nest year we will be a larger organization and have more outlets and contacts. I will sell a couple of calendars this year and start shooting for the 2015 issue...

Meanwhile, I will be at home with the 15 dogs left here. That is not as hard as it seems. Seven are young puppies in pens and the 3-moms take care of them. The other five dogs are our house dogs and are totally house trained. Additionally, it is not raining so we can make frequent potty trips outside. I may even get to watch some college football games in my spare time...

I also plan to do a crash course in making posters using Photoshop CS6. The above poser was done in Microsoft Word...

[flashback]

Bah humbug! (Too soon?) Kidding, great shots, great subjects and kudos for the work you do with rescue dogs!

[arith]

I think a calendar is a fantastic idea, I think in portrait mode and you don't have to advertise to somebody that already bought one. Keep it simple.

[Colin Southern]

It's definitely too late to bring a 2014 calendar to market intended for wide distribution. It could perhaps work for 2014 for the relatively few participants in the rescue organization.

Although, on a smaller scale, it may well be possible to produce them as orders come in (we have a local printshop that produces things like this on high-quality lazer printers - so one can do economical runs as small as they like. Keeping in mind the emotive side of it too -- many people would buy one just to support the cause (and possibly throw/give it away afterwards).

[rpcrowe]

many people would buy one just to support the cause (and possibly throw/give it away afterwards).

Throw away my art! Horrors

By the way, I shot these as well as many of my other non-themed rescue dog images with a very simple setup that has evolved over time.

At first I used a setup like this...


Which I admit produced very nice results...


However the problem was that my wife got tired of having this set up in the living room. I shoot 4-5 dogs a week so setting up and breaking it down became a big pain in the you know where. I have a large RV garage that I had planned to use part of as a permanent studio. However the garage is very dusty for some reason and I have to break down the gear and store it or it will be covered with grime.

I had to do a very quick shot one morning as we were going to take a dog in for surgery at the vet. My wife discovered that we had no photos of the dog and it would be a while after surgery before the dog looked good enough for a portrait. We had to leave immediately, so I placed the dog on the couch and shot her using a hotshoe mounted 550EX flash, bounced off the ceiling and modified with a Demb Flash Diffuser Pro. The results were O.K., but certainly not great. The couch was not a very good background but, the single flash lighting was fairly decent which started me thinking...


My creative juices got flowing and I tried to figure how to shoot relatively quick portraits that looked fairly decent without having to go through a complicated setup – breakdown each time I shot. At first I tried masking and changing the background but, that didn't work too well.

I have a four compact fluorescent bulb softbox which I purchased on eBay for about $35 U.S. Dollars. The CFL bulbs are daylight balanced. I had the softbox set up for videotaping some puppies and my wife doesn't seem to mind me leaving this in the living room (unless we were having guests). I decided to see what the results might be if I added this to my bounced flash. It seemed to work O.K., no great problems with mixed light source, probably because I was lighting such a small area. Since I was not experiencing problems with the mixed light sources, I decide to throw one more ringer into the mix. My wife uses a Ott Light reading lamp and that is always by the chair. I turned it on as a background light and still no great mixed source problems. I have a variety of colored fleece throws and I covered a recliner with one of the throws. Here is what the end result looks like...


It certainly doesn't look professional. In fact it looks jury-rigged and rinky-dink. However, despite its looks and the totally wild mixed light sources, the results are not bad at all...




Now I am ready whenever one of our volunteers stops by with a dog to photograph. It takes about 30-seconds to set up the shot. I always have my 7D with my 70-200mm f/4L IS lens set up with a flash and a Flash Diffuser Pro. The fact that the images are somewhat cookie-cutter in looks is actually an advantage since my images are instantly recognizable on the various rescue sites on which I post, such as www.petfinder.com.

I have accumulated a large selection of various color fleece throws so that I am ready to shoot dogs of various coat colors. The throws are easy to store and are quite inexpensive at three to six U.S. Dollars each. And… despite the horrors of the mixed lighting; the results are really not bad at all...




I was sure that I would need to revert back to the original set up for the Christmas wreath image. However, I did a quick shot with just the wreath on the fleece and it seemed reasonable. I felt sure that after some PP, I could work with the image...


And I did with Liberty, the Maltipoo rescue dog, under the wreath...



BTW: I always shoot the images in the landscape position since I never know what uses I have for the images. Early in my dog shooting, I had a calendar company that wanted to use a couple of my shots. However since they were shot in the portrait mode the images were unusable for their calendar. I take advantage of the larger file size of the 7D and crop the portrait configured images from my landscape images.

I always shoot in RAW and will normally get my white balance in ACR by using the white eye dropper tool on the white coats of the dogs I shoot. After-all, it is the coat that I want white. When I shoot dogs with a colored coat, I will include a shot of the WhiBal card with each series.

I process in ACR and then open my image in Photoshop CS6. I follow up with edits in both CS6 and NIK. After all editing, except for cropping and output sharpening, is done; I save the image as a PSD master. From that master I can crop anything I want and apply output sharpening as per the uses of that image. I always have the PSD master as well as the RAW image basically untouched...

[travis4567]

Thanks Richard for showing your lighting setup..very informative. Congrats again on your great rescue work.

[Trina]

As usual all the work you do is stunning.... the second one just took my breath away... I agree make some calendars... I'm sure you would have no problem selling them!!! Keep up the great work you do... and bless you for all you do for these little pups...

[rpcrowe]

As I was perusing my images in Bridge, I picked out another (different) Thanksgiving type image of our little foster Shih Tsu, Micca. Which one do you like better..

Original I posted...


The newer one...

[Trina]

Richard the second one seems to have better lighting, but I like her pose in better in the first one...

[jprzybyla]

Richard, you have a talent to bring out the best in these little guys. Gorgeous images, a calendar to be cherished.

[rpcrowe]

Trina,
The lighting was the same in both images. It might be the PP that brings out the second image. I will go back and see if I can tweak the original a bit!