My Dog

These are two pictures of my dog that I love. I love the look in her eyes. Critiques welcome.

I like the dog too! The black and white makes for interesting compositions in snow. Is this how you took the pictures or are they croopped? I'd prefer seeing more of the dog's head. In the second picture you appear to have crouched down to the level of the dog, and that's often a great start in getting a great pictures of an animal. It makes the animal, itself, more important.

You can post large images so we can see rendering of detail and shading.

Photographing white objects, like clouds, the brides dress or the fur of a dog like yours, requires care so that details of the tonality are not lost. This is where both bracketing and RAW images are useful. If the dog is particularly still, you can even use the black fur from one image exposed for the shadows with the white fur exposed for the highlights and hand merge in layers in Photshop. Even not approaching the boundries of the black and white, the effect should be impressive!

It's great to have a subject that you, yourself adore, since your own satisfaction and thrilling experience is key to the best artistry, as you are driven by devotion.

The dog had a neck and spine and paws which all add up to evocative shapes which call on you to explore. So I'd boldly go where few have gone before and just study your dog and show us your work. it will be a great journey!

I'd post an image say 500-800 pixels wide, depending on the subject and you can also post small cutouts at 100% so we can see the fine detail.

Thanks for sharing,

Asher

I didn't do any cropping with either of these. They were taken quickly since my dog was more interesting in getting me to throw her ball for her to chase than holding still long enough for me to get a good shot. I'll repost the images at a larger size when I get a chance.

Larger Images

Here are the larger versions of these pictures






This is a cropped version of the second one. You can see a hint of my reflection in her eyes.

Your dog....

Hi Jessica,

Yes, your Border Collie has much finer features than my BC., Is she pure bred? As mentioned previously, I'd also like to see more of her head. There certainly is some fine detail in the photos that you have here. What lens did you use to take them?

Barry.

Here is a picture of her that shows her full body. I believe that she is a pure bred, but as she was a rescue dog, I don't know for sure. She is also one of the rare BC who are mostly white rather than mostly black. I didn't have my own camera at the time so I was using my parents' Nikon digital camera that didn't have interchangable lenses. I can't remember what type of camera they have either.

Hi Jessica. I am an animal lover and a photographer hobbiest. I see what you mean about the dog's eyes. They are very captivating. The rendition of the dog's head in the last headshot photo shows a lot of detail in the fur around the nose. I like it. Depth of field is very shallow and could be improved by a smaller F number. Some photographers purposely use a larger DOF to isolate the eyes, face, etc. Again, I like the head shot photos.

Bev

Bonsoir Jessica

Sorry, I couldn't resist, your dog and your love for her/he pushed me to proposed a more… say sharp version… If you don't like it I can easily delete this post…

I do like it. I think that looks great. I haven't done much editing on these images because I'm afraid of screwing them up (I know that I don't have to save the changes, but I still can't force myself to do any editing), but I think I'll have to take a look at them again and do some editing to see if I can get her eyes to stand out more and to make the white more white.

White is never white… nor black (is black)