Frodo and Twig

To say I had a great time at this photo session with Frodo and Twig and their parents is an understatement. It all started with an email a few weeks ago from their dad who wanted to schedule a session with their 14 year old dog Frodo. He suggested a location that I've wanted to try for a long time. It's about 30 minutes from my house and it was sooo worth the drive. I want to go back to this park soon and do some sunset photos. Anybody game? Frodo's mom and dad, Monica and Brent decided to bring along their rescued dingo, Twig. In these photos, Twig is on leash the entire time (and I edited it out through the magic of Photoshop. :) ) We started the session on a road flanked by trees. It was just beautiful and actually a setting I have been wanting to find because it reminds me of a photo shoot we did in Spain. Reason #1 I can thank Monica and Brent for suggesting this park. It was perfect.

I find that I want to use the term "rock star" a lot after my photography sessions and I'm going to now. Frodo was a ROCK STAR. He's 14 but you'd never know it! He had so much personality and energy, he's a testament to the great care he gets from his mom and dad. They are both veterinarians. My focus for the session was to concentrate on the dogs but the photo above of the 3 of them just gets me ever time I see it. I love this photo.

We snapped a few photos at the old cabin. I'd love to go on the tour of this park and learn about its history. I would love the know this building's story and know more about who spent time here.

These next photos might be my favorite from the day. I loved the trees (if you've read my previous blog posts, you know I have a love/hate relationship with trees.) I'll say it again, I loved the trees. ha! The setting was just beautiful.

By this time, Twig was fairly fired up by the other dogs and horses that were around. Yes, there are horses!! He was highly interested in them and wanted to go zooming around. He did and what do you know? Frodo got a burst of energy and started chasing Twig around. It was hilarious and I was able to capture their spontaneity.

Which photo is your favorite? I love it when that's a hard decision to make!

Pet Photography Project 52, week 28: White Balance for Mood

For week 28 of our pet photography challenge, we are talking about white balance and specifically how we can play with it to create a different mood in our images. This is where being create comes into play and I just don't feel like I am "there" yet with my photography. I spend all of my efforts trying to create a visually correct image and that includes trying to get the white balance correct. White balance in an image is the process of creating correct color balance in a photo so whites are white. Creating correct color balance generally means the neutral tones in the scene are rendered neutral in the photograph, without a color cast. If you take cell phone photos (or photos with a camera for that matter), look at them now and answer this question: do the whites look white? Do they look pink, green, yellow or blue? If they do that's common because getting the white balance correct is hard. I just scrolled through my cell phone pics and I learned 2 things: I don't take very many cell phone photos and when I do, they are either yellow or pink.

There are tools to use in Lightroom and Photoshop to adjust these but as my instructor Nicole Begley of Nicole Begley Photography said at Barkelona, just use a gray card before taking your shots. Then you'll know you have the correct white balance. How many times do I forget to use my gray card..... ?? I won't answer that. :)

So the above photos don't work when I try to adjust the white balance and create a mood so I set out to do that. This is definitely outside of the box for me and outside of my comfort zone. I just don't feel like I have the experience under my belt yet to be super creative with my photography but part of the reason I'm doing these challenges weekly is to step outside the box.

My first dilemma was this: should I keep the camera on auto white balance? Since my subject is a dog, if I adjust the white balance for the entire scene, the dog is going to end up blue, yellow, green or pink and I can't think of a scenario when that works. Below I've used a photo with auto WB and then in Lightroom I adjusted for blue and yellow white balance.

This is a blog circle to next up is Pet Love Photography, serving Greater Cincinnati and the San Francisco Bay area . Keep clicking the link at the end of each post and you'll end up right back here.

Project 52: week 29: Backlight

First of all, my apologies to the other photographers for my late entry into our project 52 challenge. I've had an exciting couple of days and I have been distracted. I was really excited when I saw the challenge for this week because I love images with backlight. I had the pleasure of working with Charlotte Reeves of Charlotte Reeves Photography when I was in Spain in April at Barkelona. She is famous for the way she backlights her subjects so I got to learn from the best. However learning and then actually doing proved to be 2 different things. :)

Here is the story of my shots for this week.

I've been working on getting a new logo made for BARKography. My thought was to try and use my lab Moose (you know.... the crazy one) as the model for my logo. My goal was to use him in these backlighting shots and also create an image to use for my logo. I had been texting with a friend about this and she offered to help me with crazy Moose.... get this, at sunrise! She is a good friend.

We met at Freedom Park which is a nice park, with a large lake and stone bridge. I have an app that helps me see where the sun is going to rise, it gives you the golden hour times (the app is The Photographer's Emphemeris) so I felt pretty prepared.  The app is fairly complicated (to me anyway) and what it would've told me but I failed to do was check the elevation. It will determine elevation and the surrounding terrain and factor that in and I skipped that step. If you've been to Charlotte NC before, there are lots of tree.  Lots. Of. Trees. Said trees were interfering with my sunrise shots.

My biggest takeaway from the weekend was to assess the location and work with what it is giving me. I'd gone into the session thinking that I could take photos of Moose with the lake in the background and the backlight behind him which was perfect because the sun was rising behind the lake. What I didn't learn until after the session was that all that water and sky behind my dark brown dog was tricky at best to get the proper exposure.

This is a blog circle. Click the link at the bottom of each post and you'll end up right back here. I can't wait to see the other's photographs using backlighting. Next up is St. Cloud based & serving central Minnesota, About A Dog Photography.

Project 52 - week 21: Leading Lines

For our week 21 challenge, we are to create images with leading lines. The author of the book we are using says that "the eye will follow a line." In the first image below, the lines are really obvious and they are leading you to the subject. Her name is Delilah and she lasted up on this bench for about 10 seconds which may have something to do with the look in her eyes. :) She jumped off and got the zoomies right after I snapped this. She was a good sport though and I appreciate her helping me this week.  I snapped a few more of photos of Delilah and her half sister Lucca while they were on the deck.  Do you think the lines add anything to the last two images?  Would it look much different if they were standing on their driveway with no lines beneath them?  I so appreciate these weekly exercises as they make me ask myself these types of questions.  Forever learning about photography.... :)

I was hoping to take some photographs this week with images of more implied lines but unfortunately I didn't get a chance. As I was driving through the Virginia countryside this past weekend I saw a train track below me leading into a forest of dense trees. Our challenge to use leading lines this week popped into my head because when I think of leading lines I think of a curved path similar to those train tracks.

I also have a vision in my head of a photograph I want to take.  It is of my husband and his dog (our dog :) ) Willow walking away from me down a path. There is something about watching the two of them when they're on a walk that just makes me happy. Willow is my dog that doesn't like any sound my camera makes so this type of photo would be a good one to take of her. I need to add that photo to my list of photos I plan to take (because I have not forgotten about taking a photo of a dog in front of the graffiti wall I found while researching last week's challenge colorful.) School will be out soon and my two favorite photography assistants will be available to help me. Hopefully then I can start to cross some of these photos on my "to do" list off the list. Yay summer!

Next up in our blog circle is About A Dog Photography, St. Cloud MN dog photographer.  Be sure to click the link at the bottom of each blog and then you'll end up back here when you're finished.  Enjoy!

Barkelona Day 2, 1st Photo Shoot

Our Barkelona workshop included a combination of classroom and on location photo sessions. In the morning both Nicole and Sam led classroom talks. Day 2 of Barkelona had 2 photo sessions. We did one inside the villa we were staying in and then in the evening we photographed several dogs outside and around the villa.  I don't have the right words to describe how beautiful is was. There I met Forca, a chocolate lab. She is a trained therapy dog and she made me miss my man Moose. However unlike Moose, she posed perfectly for her portraits... but I'm getting ahead of myself. More on her in a bit! For the indoor photo session, my group started with Taila, a golden retriever / cocker spaniel mix. She was a little unsure of all of the attention she was getting but she posed beautifully. Even when we put her in the chair and in front of a chess set! She must've thought we were crazy. And we are: crazy dog photographer people. All of us!!

This 2nd photo is the amazing Kaylee Greer of Dog Breath Photography and a little behind the scenes of her setting up the shot of Taila.  Ingrid is Taila's dog trainer giving her some instructions too.

Our next model was a dog that caught my attention when she arrived.  Her name is Pepa and she's an English Bulldog.  In all my years of dog walking, I've never met a bulldog until April 16, 2016 and I had to go all the way to Spain to do it!  Pepa was a great model and even tolerated more of our crazy dog photographer antics... see below!

We then moved outside and photographed a jack russell terrier.  I hate to say this but there were two JRTs and I'm not sure if this is Elsa or Teo.

We took a short break after photographing all these cuties and then we had more classroom work.  After an early dinner, 4 dogs came to our villa to be photographed during our student led shoot.  That's where I met Forca.  Stayed tuned for the next blog post....

Project 52 - week 16: Try it in Black & White

For week 16 of Project 52, Try it in Black & White, I am in Spain!!!  I found out last year about a dog photography workshop called 'Barkelona' to be held just outside of Barcelona and I am here.  It is amazing - truly a pinch myself moment.   I don't have the words to describe how beautiful it is and literally as I'm typing this the church bells in the village of Olivella which is just below our villa have started to ring.  Today, it is my heaven. I am here with 14 other ladies from all over the world (America, England, Ireland and Australia) and the 3 instructors for the event:  Kaylee Greer of Dog Breath Photography,  (the color inspiration is for Kaylee and if this doesn't make sense, go to her page and read her bio), Charlotte of Charlotte Reeves Photography  and Nicole of Nicole Begley Photography.   A Barcelona based trainer Ingrid Ramon is staying here with us too AND she brought her dogs, Edna a rottie and Blat a yellow lab.  (Blat means wheat in Spanish.)   Ingrid has lined up all of the dogs that we'll be photographing over the next several days.  It's going to be a jammed packed, exciting, memorable time!

The village in Olivella is gorgeous.  The stone work, the old buildings, the wildflowers and the surrounding hills are a perfect setting for photographing.  We photographed 3 different sets of dogs last night.  One of the dogs we photographed was a puppy named Luc.  Since the theme for this week is try it in black & white, I thought Luc and his story would be appropriate for black & white photos.

Luc is a Galgo or Spanish Greyhound.  I learned about these dogs and the breed's history during my stay in Spain.  My heart broke when I learned more about these dogs' plight. For reasons I cannot understand, this breed originally brought to Spain by noblemen and held in high esteem, is now deemed worthless.  They are used for hunting hare each season and then as part of the tradition, they are killed after the hunt.  I couldn't bear to hear about their history and the torture they endure.

There are rescue groups across the world involved in improving the outlook for these dogs. We were fortunate and thrilled to meet Luc and his brother Ovi who were recently adopted. Yay for them!!

I didn't really get to know Luc but I believe this last photo probably sums him up.  Just look at those bright eyes, nun ears and silly grin!  Good for you Luc.  Enjoy your life sweet pup!

Next up in the blog circle is Little White Dog Pet Photography - Sioux Falls, SD   Be sure to click the link at the bottom of each post and you'll end up here when you are done.

PS  If you'd like to see these two images in color, look at my blog post dated 4/21/16!