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How they do it
Taking photographs of our own dogs can be a real challenge, so using someone else's dog with a photo we didn't take can be a real nail-biter.
And so it was with the top three vote-getters of The News-Gazette's Happy Tails Photo Contest. The easiest of the three to turn into a dog person, not surprisingly, also happened to be the best exposed photograph of Bud the St. Bernard. Bud was photographed in a tuxedo and wearing a little hat. We thought about going with a wedding theme and turning Bud into a “dog groom,” but that proved too difficult. Besides, what's a groom without a bride?
My wife, Cindy, and I then came up with the notions of having Bud either holding an ice cream cone (because of his impressive tongue) or posed with a bunch of flowers. The flowers won out because we could not get the ice cream to look right. We also enlarged his hat, added another paw and fixed his eyes because of the reflection of the flash in the original photograph.
Pedro was actually the first dog we turned into a dog person. We were restricted because of the angle the photographer was looking down on Pedro to take the photo. Also, the depth of field was not good and the shutter speed was slow (he's a bit out of focus). In addition, Pedro was a real challenge to cut out because of his extremely furry face.
We decided the best course of action was to have Pedro looking up at the camera with his arms crossed sort of an “I've got an 'attitude'” shot.
Minie was the most challenging photo to turn into a dog person. The photograph was badly underexposed (too dark) and low resolution with lots of chroma and digital noise. It was difficult to tell Minie's outline, which is crucial to creating a dog person.
Because only one side of her face was lit up and the other half quite dark, we decided to have Minie sitting at a candle-lit table with a plate of dog bones in front of her. We removed the buckles on her dog collar and added more yellow light to the side of her face. We also had to take the digital noise out of her face and match the low resolution with our base candlelight photo.
It's really a lot of work to turn a dog into a dog person, but we hope you enjoy the results and would like to thank everyone for participating in the contest. -- KIRBY AND CINDY PRINGLE
Here are tips for taking photographs of your pets:
Dogs and especially cats have short attention spans. Cats can be extremely challenging to photograph because they don't like to sit still. It's best to use two people when taking pet photos, one person to take the photos and the other to get the animal's attention. My wife and I use dog biscuits, cheese and squeaky toys to get our dogs to look in a certain direction. We also “moo” “meow” and “bark” at our dogs (good thing we live in the country).
Reward your pet after every photo session with praise and a dog biscuit. Our dogs are so used to us taking their photos they actually seem to enjoy posing.
Light is the secret to any good photograph. Try to photograph your pet in as much light as possible. Bright, overcast days are best for outside shots. If it's a bright, sunshiney day then take the photograph in the shade. Watch for harsh shadows (noontime shots are the worst) and try using a fill flash.
For interior shots, turn on all the lights you can and use an ISO setting of at least 400. On point-and-shoot digital cameras, this setting can lead to a lot of digital noise, but this is better than using the on-camera flash, which can blow out highlights and cause “red eye” (or in dogs, “evil eye”).
If you have a sophisticated flash unit, try bouncing the flash off the ceiling or use a diffuser.
Manually set your white balance. On digital cameras, the auto white balance setting is usually not the best. For digital SLRs, it's a different story. Still, on our digital SLRs we always manually set the white balance.
If you can manually set your shutter speed, make sure it's at least 1/250th of a second, preferrably higher. Dogs and cats move, so you need to stop that movement. For cameras with a shutter speed that cannot be set, then use the “sports figure” setting.
Likewise, if you can set your camera's aperture and you have a digital point-and-shoot, make sure it's f5.6 or f8. For digital SLRs, the sweet spot for most lenses is from f8 to f16. If you want a blurred background, then use a “wide open” setting like f2.8.
Watch for distracting backgrounds. Try to photograph your pet in a garden, on a big expanse of lawn or against a building. We use our red corn crib for the background in many photos. -- KIRBY PRINGLE
