Love for an old dog

[lovelife65]

I was just finishing up a hike at Ebey's Landing and it was pretty much dark. This lady asked me to take her photo of her and her dog, whom she said was 12 and a half years old and she didn't know how much longer the pup had.

I'll email it to her when finally finished.
And suggestions for improvement always welcome.

love for an aging dog by sharonkay finley, on Flickr

[Shadowman]

Hi Sharon,

The silhouette works as shown for one concept, another option would be to adjust the shadows a bit to bring out a bit more detail on the subjects.

[Manfred M]

A very nice image Sharon. I'm sure the woman will appreciate the image; the pose and setting are great.

I agree with John that you can certainly look at opening up the shadows and show the features of the dog and woman although I quite like what you have done here too. The two approaches will give you totally different images.

You might want to consider cropping down fairly aggressively and perhaps consider a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. Losing the top of the sky certainly will not hurt and will bring the subjects into greater prominence. You could also look at cropping some of the grass at the far left hand side to see if that strengthens or weakens the image.

There seems to be an issue with your basic edit as I see some large halos around the dog's head and woman's face as well as some sensor dust in the sky.

[xpatUSA]

Great atmosphere, Sharon, matches the title perfectly. No suggestions from me 'cuz I don't shoot that kind of image ...

[lovelife65]

Hi Sharon,

The silhouette works as shown for one concept, another option would be to adjust the shadows a bit to bring out a bit more detail on the subjects.

Thanks John. it is supposed to be her and her dog. I think I pushed the skies a little too hard as well.

[lovelife65]

A very nice image Sharon. I'm sure the woman will appreciate the image; the pose and setting are great.

I agree with John that you can certainly look at opening up the shadows and show the features of the dog and woman although I quite like what you have done here too. The two approaches will give you totally different images.

You might want to consider cropping down fairly aggressively and perhaps consider a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. Losing the top of the sky certainly will not hurt and will bring the subjects into greater prominence. You could also look at cropping some of the grass at the far left hand side to see if that strengthens or weakens the image.

There seems to be an issue with your basic edit as I see some large halos around the dog's head and woman's face as well as some sensor dust in the sky.

Thank you Manfred. The image appears very noisy to me as well, not sure what's up with the grasses behind her back either, but a crop is certainly in order. Going to reset and start over. I will send her both a silhouette as well as an opened up image.

[pschlute]

Super image that captures the bond between them. I like the silhouette style and the only suggestion i would make is possibly crop a little from top left

[DanK]

It's a great pose--it really captures the bond between them.

Personally, I think I would go with a full silhouette. It may be hard to get the darker areas looking good if you brighten because they are substantially underexposed. However, both approaches could be good.

I think what Manfred was suggesting was sensor dust, not noise. I've circled the biggest offender:



You can usually get rid of this in postprocessing, particularly when it is in a detail-free area, but the real solution is to clean the sensor. The brighter parts of the images don't seem noisy to me. The dark areas will be, I suspect, if you brighten them because they are so underexposed.

Can you explain what you did for processing? That might help people figure out what could have caused the halos Manfred mentioned.

Hindsight is always clearer, but I think ideally you should have pointed the camera farther down. The crop at the bottom is too tight, and you have more sky than you need. If you cropped, I would crop less from the bottom, more from the top, and as Peter suggested, a bit from the left.

[rpcrowe]

I love the feeling of love between a human and an animal that this image portrays. I have begun to dread Christmas because, my Goldendoodle. Holly, was born on Christmas Day and each Christmas she is a year older.

[MichpixLondon]

Hi Sharon,
as a dog owner, I can appreciate what you're trying to do here. As already stated, I'm not sure what editing you have already done, but you need to look at the halos especially around the lady and the dog (+ minor dust spots in the sky, but for a dog owner, I'd very much doubt they'd notice those tbh).
I'm not sure how many photos you took, if you were going to look at a brighter version then I'm not sure it would work unless you had a version where you'd used a fill flash/or in-camera flash to get alot more details,otherwise just lifting the details would give you a very noisy/grainy area.... personally I like the silhouettes, although I would try seeing how it looks if you take them darker still? (I use Adobe's Camera Raw in Bridge to make changes like that with the Adjustment Brush)...I had similar difficulties with this shot and had to manually darken alot of some figures to make it more effective...and I get you're not necessarily going for a total silhouette, but may be worth seeing if that works for you...also I would definitely try a little tweaking of the background, what you can do will depend on what software you have etc... I recently used a polarising filter in Nix (post) on a shot i'd taken in strong sunlight, and it made quite alot of difference... I usually do most of my editing just with Camera Raw, and even a few tweaks can make a considerable difference... I think cropping in a little might help, I would go with the lady's back as the right side and crop landscape from there (I did take a photo of the screen to show what I meant, but forgot you can't just load a photo up here without loading it up somewhere else first eugh) + i'd check if the horizon is straight, I can't be sure without a grid but my ocd is wanting to tilt slightly(?)
Anyway, I hope you don't mind a newbie making suggestions, I regularly get critiqued at the camera clubs I attend, and it can be easy to forget how much it stung the first few times they did it lol - overall I like the image, i'm just a bit of a perfectionist (a symptom of the Photographic Society Disease I'm afraid haha)....I should just say, these suggestions are to just to make your image perfect by photographic standards, as a dog owner I would love any image I had with my dog in it if I lost them... I've got tons of photos I've taken on my mobile phone that aren't great but I still wouldn't delete them etc.


I'm no expert, I only know what I know lol

If you need any help, feel free to give me a yell...

All the best,

Mich

[lovelife65]

Thanks Mich for taking the time to teach and for your suggestions.
I'm here to learn, I don't have thin skin nor do I take anything personally. Sometimes I agree, other times not.

I guess I could take the image a different/softer direction. It was dark when I took this photo, and it was handheld with no real compensation for the darkness, as I really didn't want to change the time nor mood.

This isn't particularly wonderful but is a softer approach, and more silhouette driven.

Love of dog by sharonkay finley, on Flickr


Thank you again for your detailed comments, I don't consider you as a newbie