Hanging With Dodger Dog

[Tri Danimal]

Hanging out with one of our dogs in the backyard I was working on other photos but happened to capture this photo.

37mm, ISO100, 1/125sec, F4, light editing in Lightroom

[Shadowman]

Nice effort except for the cropping of the legs.

[Tri Danimal]

Nice effort except for the cropping of the legs.

The cropping was due to a rushed framing of the photo, I can't fix it in post :-(

[rpcrowe]

I can't count the number of fog pictures in which I erroneously cropped off part of the dog's legs even though I concentrate on not doing that...

The problem with this image, as I see it is that the background is very bright while the dog is back lit. This ends up with the dog being a lot darker than the background and my eye naturally gravitates to the brightest areas of the image. Additionally, there are no visible catchlights in the dog's eyes.

The way to prevent this in shooting is 1. selecting a background that will not overwhelm the image or 2. using fill flash or 3. don't shoot a back lit subject. I like to use fill flash because it produces catchlights but, I need to have my flash off camera: either holding it or on a bracket ( https://photos.smugmug.com/Photograp...ip%20two-M.jpg ) so I don't get the "blue eye effect". The flash can be triggered with either an off camera cord or a radio transmitter. The Joe Demb Flash Diffuser Pro with the FlipIt portion of that unit tilted towards the subject( https://photos.smugmug.com/Photograp...user%20pro.jpg ) will produce some very nice lighting. The flash can either be used in manual of TTL. I will dial the power of the flash down a stop or two.

As far as this shot goes, I think that it might be improved a bit by cropping out major portions of the bright background, brightening the dog a bit and reducing some of the brightness of the background...



Here is a conundrum that I often face... It is easier to get my camera low at the dog's eye level when I use an articulating LCD as my viewfinder but, when I do; I often have problems framing my image and will often miss problems occurring along the sides of my frame. These problems can include the cutting off portions of my subject and having weird things intrude into the side of the frame like tree limbs or parts of people...

There are several solutions to this:

1. Lay down when shooting but, at my age, I would need help getting up and the ground is often dusty or dirty. Sometimes just kneeling will get you low enough but, kneeling is no longer in my bag of tricks.
2. Elevate the dog on a chair, stool, box or anything
3. Shoot with a long focal length lens from a distance combined with bending down a bit or kneeling which produces the illusion that you are lower
4. Get a right angle viewfinder

Generic viewfinders can run between $20 and the sky is the limit Just make sure the one you get is compatible with your camera setup. Here is an example:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Hoodman-H-R...frcectupt=true