Charlie laughing
Charlie finds something terribly amusing
Charlie finds something terribly amusing
Read less
Read less
May, 2013Views
431
Likes
Awards
Absolute Masterpiece
Top Choice
Superb Composition
Peer Award
Top Ranks
Top 10 rankTop 10 rank week 1
Top 30 rank week 1
Top 30 rank week 1Categories
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
Discover more photos See all
Behind The Lens
Location
I am a Canadian amateur photographer who has been shooting photo's for over 40 years. My wife and I lived on a small farm in Manitoba for a year and my favourite subject there was Charlie the big red dog. This photo was taken in our yard where he loved to play 'King of the Hill'. After beating me to the top of the hill he got a little too excited and started wheezing but to me it looked a little like he was laughing and mocking me for being such a slow human.Time
This was taken on April 06, 2013 at 16:54. The days were getting a little longer by that time and all of the late snow helped with getting the exposure properly.Lighting
I shot this handheld with natural light which was aided quite well by the soft overcast daylight reflecting from the snow. I used a very small aperture setting of F29 and a reasonable shutter speed of 1/250th second at ISO 250 with my Nikon D300s. I wanted the small aperture in order to get a proper exposure on Charlie while keeping the snow from being over exposed and blowing out but still maintaining a fast enough shutter speed to freeze Charlie.Equipment
I used my trusty workhorse Nikon D300s with a Sigma 17-70/ 2.8-4 HSM Lens with a Hoya Pro 1 Circular Polarizer.Inspiration
I am an absolute avid dog lover and while we had 4 dogs at the farm, Charlie was usually my main pet subject. He would follow me everywhere I went and since he was still just a huge puppy he was always good for plenty of action shots. This particular day Charlie was playing 'King of the Hill' on this big mound of snow on the property and while I was shooting some portraits of him he started wheezing and coughing from over excitement. I composed my shot and got him laughing at me.Editing
I always shoot RAW and all of my developing is started in Lightroom then rarely I will use a plug-in if I feel the image needs it. With this photo I used Lightroom for the lens corrections and lightened shadows to get more detail in Charlies coat and lowered the highlights to bring detail into the snow. I then moved it into NIK Software's Silver Effex Pro2 for the Black and White conversion where I generally pick a preset then adjust to fit the image.In my camera bag
My bag is stuffed full of goodies but like everyone else it begs for more. My main body is a Nikon D300s with my Sigma 17-70/2.8-4 Macro HSM, a Sigma 70-200/2.8 that I really love and a Nikkor Nifty 50/1.8 that I usually forget about having. For lighting I use a Nikon SB600 speedlight and a bag full of Vivitar 280 flashes from my film days. I fire these off camera with Cactus Wireless remotes. For a tripod I have a 20 year old Velbon CX540 along with Westcott reflectors and an Umbrella. I have kept all of my old film SLR's as well and love to take them out for some Black and White landscapes. In this collection I have a couple of Minolta Maxxums, Canon AE1, Canon Rangefinder, an old Russian Practica and a couple of others hiding in storage.Feedback
Pet photography is a labour of love for me so every time I am home and go out with my dogs I carry my camera on and ready to go. I will manually preset my exposure settings for a general setting so that when I do get to shoot the dogs doing fun and interesting things I won't have to move the settings one way or the other very much. I keep the shutter on continuous burst because dogs are just so unpredictable in what goofy expression they will have from second to second.
