Hello friends! As you know we don’t have a live show this week since T&C will be in Germany for Photokina! So I spent the week getting used to my little Olympus E-M10. I’m really enjoying this thing. I just shot whatever caught my eye around the house and tried to get used to all the buttons and dials.
Yesterday was hazy and grey, but it made for some good light, so I followed my dog into the back yard to get some shots. He is not the most patient model. I did my best with a fast shutter speed and a liberal sprinkling of dog treats and “sit” commands to get what I could. And most of all, I took lots of shots. Here’s what I came up with.
Meet Hungry! Shot at 1/80th of a second, f/3.5, ISO 200.
Same settings, handsomest boy.
Can you spot all my sloppy cloning and patching?
I’m pretty proud of these, but I might be biased. He’s definitely a one-note model, we really need to work on his expression.
Black dogs are hard to photography because they just seem to swallow light, luckily he has some brown mixed in, so I think I was able to show some detail in his fur. The yard is a bit distracting, so I had to clone out some random things, and went black and white on a few of my edits to simplify. I did basic edits in Lightroom, adjusting the exposure based on my histogram to make sure I had some white points and black points. Then I brought them into Photoshop and used the content-aware-fill tool to get rid of some distracting twigs and backyard clutter.
We did a live show on dog photography with our wonderfully talented friend Erkki Alvenmod a few months back that I found helpful, you might too! Have you photographed pets? What are your tips?
