Dog tired

WHAT

This is my dog, Nelson, having a lie down in his kennel. He's a 7 year old labradoodle and the first dog I've ever owned.

WHY

Why else do people take photos of their pets? Because they love them and want to capture their personality and antics. Plus, I'd recently been asked to photograph the pets of some friends and I wasn't 100% happy with the results, so I thought I'd practice.

HOW

Before venturing anywhere near Nelson, I had the camera already set to what I'd anticipated would work for the outside lighting conditions. This was on manual mode, aperture of 8 and a shutter speed of 1/13s (gauged from using the camera's light meter). This ensured that should he decide to suddenly move and ruin the cute pose, at least I'd have a fleeting chance of getting 1 or 2 quick shots in.

This shot was taken from just outside the back door to our house which is where Nelson's kennel is located. I had to move very slowly out the door with the camera in order to capture him lying down like this because usually as soon as I even look like going outside, Nelson comes flying out of his kennel excited and thinking he's going to get walked, fed or patted (or all three).

I focused on his eyes and got down very low so that I was at his level. I also used the side and floor of his kennel to frame the image.

I used aperture f/8 because this usually produces a good focal length and ensures most things are sharp and in focus. I've encounted problems previously using larger apertures (eg. f/6 and below) when photographing friend's pets with long noses - when you focus on the eyes at these larger apertures, the nose and mouth become soft/blurred and can ruin the shot as you're often trying to capture a dog's smiling mouth at the same sharpness as his eyes.

In the image above, Nelson's nose isn't 100% sharp, however I wasn't worried about that in this instance.

Because it was a very dull/rainy day, there wasn't much light available to produce a fast enough shutter speed for my liking. Therefore I increased the ISO to 320.

POST PRODUCTION

The image was firstly converted to greyscale in photoshop. I then made slight adjustments to the contrast, black point and clarity of the image.