Working Dogs At Play

Portrait Of Working Dogs

These are FEMA Search Dogs that my wife trains and handles. She also competes in Hunt Tests with them and they are posing here after a long day at a local test. I found a shallow "pond" created by heavy rains and threw some bumpers for them to retrieve. They are always up for play, especially if water is involved. It always brings a smile to their faces.It was late afternoon and the colors were really starting to come out. Recognizing what was happening I asked them to pose for me and, being the good dogs that they are, they obliged.I like how Fargo, in the middle, is looking right at the camera while Flash and Spirit are looking to the right at my wife. This was taken several years ago with my first DSLR, a D50 with 18-55 kit lens. This may have been adjusted with the auto enhance feature in PaintShop Pro, but I'm not sure. I'm just now trying to learn how to use advanced editing features.The shot is personal for me and a favorite. I like it for the colors of the dogs and the field in the late afternoon sun as well as the attentive energy my dogs bring to the shot.EDIT: The ISO was most likely 200 as that is the lowest in the D50 and I wasn't even aware of the ability to change it when I shot this (I know now). Would you have changed the ISO at the time based on the light conditions? What about the colors and exposure of the image post shot? I think the simple D50 did a decent job of balancing the light and dark dogs. Do the white dogs(really yellow Labs) have enough detail? I shot in a middle aperture because I wanted all three faces to be in focus. The middle dog was the point of focus. The dogs were momentarily "frozen" by my wife squeaking a toy so 1/160 seemed to work A squeaky toy is almost a must when trying to get one dog, let alone three, to sit still momentarily.Anyway, feedback appreciated. Thanks for this site. Best Friends by Bois Dog, on Flickr

Anything with dogs gets my attention, cos i'm a 110% dog lover, and member/supporter of a UK nationwide stray/rescue home, so this snap is appealing.

1) Personally I would have place the dogs a little more to our right in the frame, as 2 of them are looking to our left, and a little space in that direction would be a tad better i reckon. If they were all looking at the camera then for me it wouldnt matter about them being central.

2) The saturation looks a tad overdone, not by much though.

3) The yellow Labs are almost blown out on their chests and lack detail, but when i ran this through Adobe CS5, it was clear that the detail wasnt really lost. To be fair, such light coloured subjects surrounded by darker ( water, foliage etc ) is not easy to get right, and as you say you took this a few years ago when you were starting out, so i think you did very well to control it to the level seen

If its any help to you, here's couple of tweaks i made in CS5, purely to illsustrate what i meant much better than words on the screen. I tried negative on the exposure, but it lost too much pop, and flattened everything so next i tried the gamma adjustment, and this brought the detail out very nicely in the Labs chest, ( which is why mentioned before that those areas on their chests were not actually blown ).

But the gamma increased saturation, so did a minor desat, mainly for the grass / reeds which ended up way too yellowy/green, and that brought them back to reality, but then the Gingery/Golden dog lost some of his lovely colour, so i upped the red channel in the Hue layer a smidge. The all over desat didnt destroy the blues in the water, which i assume was reflection from the sky, guessing it was a lovely sunny day. Not something we're known for over here ! So i didnt need to increase the blues channel back.

I may have used ISO 400 for a slightly faster SS, to counter any possible shake. AP would have been what I used too, for DOF control

This is just my interpretation, and is not gospel by any means, but if its helped ...

The self imposed rule I try to follow is to use the lowest possible ISO ------ that I can get away with.

Thanks for the input Pierro. I am just starting to learn about editing in the computer.

It's interesting to see what you did and to compare it to the original shot. I like the detail you brought out on the Labs. I need to learn that editing skill. I agree about the Golden and believe he lost a little of that red aura he had in the original. (He is from a working line of golden retrievers and was very red in is youth. I prefer that to the lighter brown color of golden retrievers from show lines.)

Do you prefer the grass at the top in your edit VS the original? I think the edit made it a little flat. I think the water in your edit has a little more pop and I like it.

I appreciate your input.

I'm going to throw my 2 cents in and say that I like the original image than in the altered image. It is much more realistic and when I see it I do not automatically think it's a photograph and can easily put myself in the image. However, with the altered image is very photograph-like and it not as realistic as the original. I do like the added structure in the second image but would feel it needs those lovely saturated colors of summer to give the image that realistic feel.

To be sure - this is just a preference and ymmv. It's just that we all pay big bucks for sensors that bring out these wonderful colors we ought to use them!

And to Red Rover, that's a wonderful image and worthy of a frame, IMO.

Red Rover said:

Thanks for the input Pierro. I am just starting to learn about editing in the computer.

It's interesting to see what you did and to compare it to the original shot. I like the detail you brought out on the Labs. I need to learn that editing skill. I agree about the Golden and believe he lost a little of that red aura he had in the original. (He is from a working line of golden retrievers and was very red in is youth. I prefer that to the lighter brown color of golden retrievers from show lines.)

Do you prefer the grass at the top in your edit VS the original? I think the edit made it a little flat. I think the water in your edit has a little more pop and I like it.

I appreciate your input.

Click to expand...

You're welcome

I've added some vibrance back into the shot to see if you maybe prefer more colours ( its a personal thing ) and this has, by default, brought back the colour of the red dog,