Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Hi. I'm way behind. No one is surprised. I got back from China last week, voted, caught a cold from the guy sitting next to me on the plane who had the most digustingly phlegmy cough, and have spent most of the week trying to catch up on sleep, getting over cold (not quite yet) and catching up on work (ugh definitely not quite yet). Daylight savings is not helping. My productivity level plummets when it starts getting dark. So I start getting unproductive at around 3:30-4:00pm these days. Horrible.
I have so many more photos and stories from China to share, but I should get back to the routine I was trying to establish before I left. If I stop talking about pet photography I will lose any inertia I may have had, and I don't want that to happen. Because I haven't made much progress elsewhere on the biz side. I haven't gotten cards made, haven't set up site, coming with an actual biz plan, etc. OH what a pain in the ass, if only my fairy godmother was around to do it all for me. I know the vendor I want to use for the cards, I know what I want the site to look like, it's all a matter of implementation. And knitty gritty details. My brain sputters at the mention of nailing down the knitty gritty details.
Anyway, I gotta just shut up and get on with it.
SO. During a beautiful, warm Saturday afternoon sometime in late September, my sister-in-law hooked me up with her co-worker's black lab named Maggie. We met at a beach near the Rhode Island border. Oddly there was no one around, we had the entire beach to ourselves. Great weather + docile dog + beach + new camera lens = Everything's going to come out perfect without much effort. Right?
Well. Very nearly. But not quite.
First, the sun. OH GOD the sun. There was not a cloud in the sky. I purposely scheduled it for a late afternoon shoot, but still the sun was everywhere, bouncing off the white sand, the water, the dog's fur. I got nothing but glare. Here she's almost a yellow labrador. Lesson #1: get polarizer for lens.
Second, the owner would not let Maggie off the leash, not for a second, even though she was as well-mannered as a lady could be, and not another soul was around. The owner was all, She's going to run after the squirrels! Right. Beach squirrels. Then he was all, Labs are so cool, they have webbed feet to aid in swimming!! And yet there we were, at the beach, and her webbed feet remained dry.
I am sure I will get paying clients who insist their dogs remain leashed. I will just have to be sure to mention that a leash might "compromise" the photographs, do my best under the circumstances, then go home and curse when I have to spend 5 extra hours in front of the computer Photoshopping the leashes out of every picture.
I'm not great at it yet, but getter better I think.
Not terrible right? I can still see where the leash was, as my editings skillz weren't quite so clean, but I showed the above to the owner and he wants to buy an 8x10, so hah. Fooled him. Man that sun is harsh though.
Here's another shot where the leash was everywhere, but thought if it could be removed, the photo would be pretty decent.
The leash extends out from her back and out of frame to the left. I did use the clone stamp to clone parts of that yellow bushy plant over there and stamp out the leash. I didn't attempt to remove any more leash from above the dog's back because it sucked. My eyes were dying. But again, the owner did not seem to notice or mind the disappearing leash since he ordered two of these in 5x7, heh heh heh.
Well the light wasn't getting any softer even as the afternoon went on, so I decided to try something different, and that was to shoot directly into the sun, with Maggie all backlit and beautiful. I was seeing white spots for awhile, but the results came out exactly as I hoped it would, all warm and golden and soft. Also, I heart lens flare.
It was easy to Photoshop out the leash on that one.
When it's not so easy to Photoshop out the leash, and you don't feel like doing it, employ some creative cropping instead...
Ta-da!
Out of the 200-some photos I took, there were only about 10-15 that I really liked. That's not much return at all. At this stage I can't tell if the small number is due to me starting to get really picky about what shots are actually "good," or if it's because most of them actually suck. Maybe it's perfectly OK if most of them suck, as long as I can tell they suck. I'm working on my eye!
So even with the other challenges which prevented me from getting shots of a black lab frolicking along the beach, kicking up sand, or splashing in the ocean, I still thought this was a great shoot in terms of the experience gained and the lessons learned.
And because the owner bought a lot of prints.
Filed Under: Pet Photography