An Accidental Excellent Photo

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

An Accidental Excellent Portrait

     Our dog Buddy came home from the groomer 2 weeks ago.He was all "fluffed up" with his winter coat, and so naturally, my wife, Heidi says, let's take some pictures. I had just finished photographing toys, so I said OK. Unfortunately, I was set-up for toys (slow shutter speeds, combined with small lens openings on a tripod), and so I took 20 photos. I had placed buddy on my light table that I use to photograph my toys, and Buddy was a bit "uneasy".

      When I looked at the results on my computer, I was not happy, as all of the photos were either, poorly lit for the shadow detail, were badly framed, out-of-focus, and so forth. Nevertheless, I sent the photos to her computer. SHe found 1 that she liked, and I enlarged it to a 4" x 6" @ 300 dpi (dots per inch).

     As women are, Heidi sent the photo to my brother, my sister,and our friends. Everyone marvelled at the great portrait of Buddy , that I should start taking animal portraits, and all the accolades worthy of a Pulitzer prize-winning photographer.  I didn't really see the photo "with the same eyeglasses", but as they say "who am I to argue with success?".

     So below are the results of my portraits of Buddy, and naturally, I will reshoot him when I find the time and "mood" to photograph him again.

  The Initial Contact Sheet

Each image is 182 cm x 121 cm @ 72 dpi ( 71.6" x 47.6" @ 72 dpi).

I thought my IMac would crash, but it didn't.

The initial file size was huge!

Shadows/Highlights Adjustments and Automatic Colour

THe latter setting never seems to work well inPhotoshop.

The images are always too "cold", meaning that there is blue rather than red in the photo.

Compare it to "The Initial Contact Sheet", which has a slightly brown tone to it.

The Prize-Winning Photo

A Few More Salvageable Photos

     I don't really take enough photos of Buddy. He's already 9 years old, and hopefully he'll live much longer. He finally caught up to me in age in 2011 (9 years old x 7 for each human year = 63 years young).

   The progress of the digital era has certainly made huge changes. Sadly, Polaroid and Kodak are fading into history , while  tablet and cell phones, and laptops are all becoming multi-functional devices. My friend Max even told me that someone has made a movie with an IPhone that had a specially adapted lens to fit the phone. Unbelievable!

    Moral of this instalment - take plenty of photos! They cost nothing to take but some memory storage and battery drain, and they can be shared everywhere!