Snow Day

[Astramael]

When you take a holiday puppy picture, you just have to share it!

Here's Spark looking into the red sunset after bounding through the snow. This continues my ambition of being more essential and pure with my compositions.




50mm (@35mm), 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO200
Olympus OM-D E-M5, Leica DG Summilux 25/f1.4

For higher quality click here (1.9MB JPEG).


Comments and criticism always welcome.

[NorthernFocus]

Cute pup. My dog has lived her entire life in Alaska and she still lifts her paws like this when she stands still in snow.

This is nicely composed. Dog is slightly off-center looking into the frame, tracks curving through the frame, nice clean BG. Ya did good. One suggestion for future reference is to drop down on a knee to try to get closer to eye level with the hound. That will bring the head clear of the body and let all four feet show up. Though when doing so you need to be cognizant of the horizon and other BG elements.

[Shadowman]

Nice capture.

[LePetomane]

Nice looking pooch.

[RBSinTo]

Cute pup. My dog has lived her entire life in Alaska and she still lifts her paws like this when she stands still in snow.

This is nicely composed. Dog is slightly off-center looking into the frame, tracks curving through the frame, nice clean BG. Ya did good. One suggestion for future reference is to drop down on a knee to try to get closer to eye level with the hound. That will bring the head clear of the body and let all four feet show up. Though when doing so you need to be cognizant of the horizon and other BG elements.

An even more important reason for getting down, I think is the concept of taking the shot from the dog's, rather than the photographer's point of view, which will give the shot a more intimate feel. This point of view is also successfully used with small children.
Robert

[bnnrcn]

Spark looks beautiful and the image is nice Julian I would clone the branch on the ground though .

[madcrow]

Lovely image and capture.

[Astramael]

Thank you all.

Regarding taking a knee... I did think of that. In this case it was a fleeting snap, and then she was back to bounding. Although there have been other cases with better puppy perspective:

[rpcrowe]

I used NIK Viveza to make the snow more neutral. Then, I used NIK Viveza shadow slider and structure slider to show more of the dog and used the clone stamp to remove the lead image left of the dog...

[bnnrcn]

Lovely, IMO a better shooting angle

Thank you all.

Regarding taking a knee... I did think of that. In this case it was a fleeting snap, and then she was back to bounding. Although there have been other cases with better puppy perspective:

[Cogito]

Julian, could be my monitor but in your first image the snow has a blue cast, second image is nice and white!
Don't see any problem with Spark being on a leash...
Couple of nice images.
Is this northern CA? We used to live in San Rafael and I can't remember any snow.....

[Astramael]

I used NIK Viveza to make the snow more neutral. Then, I used NIK Viveza shadow slider and structure slider to show more of the dog and used the clone stamp to remove the lead image left of the dog...

Thank you for the different perspective here. I appreciate it. I also didn't know about the NIK suite of software, so I Googled it up and now I am aware. Seems pretty good for free software, color me impressed.

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I think for everybody involved more information into my process will be helpful. I do calibrate my display so I should be within the ballpark on gamma and hues.

1. The first thing I do is bring in the RAW and tune to a "neutral" base image. This isn't necessarily how I saw it, it's more of a sanity check to be sure that white is white, black is black, my exposures are all correct, nothing is blown out or crushed, my colors are accurate, etc. This is my starting point for working backwards to what feels right for how I experienced it.

2. I then begin to play with curves, levels, and whatnot to bring the black levels, white levels, overall exposure, and mid tones of the image more towards what I saw, and/or what creates the mood I am looking for. In this case I pulled the blacks way down until they felt right to me, which was quite dark. Although they are not crushed and are not generating exposure warnings. If you zoom in everything there is still visible, or at least it was on my display. The snow illumination level was not so high in this case because it was evening and it was not receiving strong direct sunlight.

3. For the colors, I started by pushing the shadows a little bit towards deep blue. Spark was looking into a red setting sun here, so anything in light is warm and even a bit red, and anything in shadow is pretty dark and a little blue. This also made the snow a little more blue which I was okay with, I think it reflects the reality of dusk snow reasonably. The highlights got pushed a bit towards red, which was appropriate because the setting sun was quite red and dropping a very heavy hue on to things, including the leading side of the snow. The snow is powdery and raised and has a noticeable cool shadow/warm highlight thing going on.

4. Sharpness and detail was adjusted to not oversharpen the snow which needs to be fluffy and not well defined, but still pick up the dog hair which was fairly sharp. Although I did not drag the sharpening up that high because otherwise it would start interfering with the snow. I didn't think masking was necessary here to separate things.

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The second image also has grading work done, although the highlights (snow) in this case was tinted a little bit red to make the image a bit friendlier and more inviting (dog is playing).

This below image is a bit different in that the whole image is graded towards blue to make it feel cold.




I'm not sure where people draw the line at image manipulation, or if that is even important. I try to make a mental note of what I saw when the photo was taken, because cameras are not so good at reproducing the subtleties of physical light (in my experience). Then I push and pull to get myself back towards what looks right to me. I think there is a habit in (serious) photography to give cameras a clinical output, black is pure black, white is pure white, and all the grays are perfect. In the real world I think light is rarely so clean and colorless, and black always contains blues or greens or something and white always contains cyans and yellows and more and it's part of what makes life have moods and feelings. Video colorists have long graded content to produce a feeling, and have a look, and it's art in the same way making photos is art. As with anything you can take it too far and that's a problem, but I try to represent things in a way that is faithful to reality (no hypercontrast with washed out filters). Although I do think that phone filters were ahead of the game in their willingness to accept essentially insta-grading into the emotional lexicon. Except they are usually very overdone.

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Is this northern CA? We used to live in San Rafael and I can't remember any snow.....

I had failed to update my location since I moved recently. This should now make more sense.

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Overall a thank you to all of you for giving good feedback, participating in my learning process, and making me think about why I like certain creative decisions, how this medium works for me, and furthering my understanding of photography.

[rpcrowe]

Julian, have you tried using some fill flash with your dog portraits. A hotshoe flash would be perfect but, the built-in flash might also help (be careful of "blue-eye" reflectoins).

[Astramael]

Hi Richard,

My camera does not have a built-in flash, it does come with a hot shoe flash.

It's funny you mention the flash because it's the next step I have been contemplating for my learning path. Not just with the dog photos, but in the general principal of controlling light more in my photos. It seems to me that people, including myself, are very obsessed with shooting in natural light and having good high-ISO performance. Which I think there is absolutely merit to, and many situations might even require it. However, as photography is about light, when one can perhaps they should attempt to add some of their own light to the subject.

So your input is appreciated, and you may see more flash work from me in future.