Autumn Wonders (aka humiliating the puppies)

White paper and softboxes again - this time with a goal of filling a pet shop's website with their current puppy offerings. Ah, the wonders of $14.00 of props...

DANG you are good Chris! These are great. Not the usual posed shots, very fresh and creative. If I lived near you I'd have you do a shoot with my dog!

Thanks, Dee Dee! It was tough - the puppies didn't really want to cooperate, they were too happy to be out of their pens/cages. Lucky if we got a keeper within 20 clicks. Also, the pet shop owner was pretty darned adamant about "cute" being the order of the day. Told via email they were going for more props, I arrived to find I was the one who was supposed to bring them. Ooops. I'm definitely the only guy I know who just happens to have a garland of plastic leaves and a pumpkin and doggie-sized scarf in the trunk of his car.

Also, I was crammed in a back room, next to three cages of sick puppies, all barking and whining into my ear less than 6 inches away. Left there with muscle cramps and a facial tic.

LOL if you can do work like this with muscle cramps and a facial tic, I'd love to see what you do on a "good" day!

Gads, good thing you happened to have props along, I am always afraid of not having something major like that with me. Maybe was for the better because these are great, really like the crop on the first with the leaf trail to the pup (don't know how you caught the pup in the right place with a cute pose to boot).

The shar pei is hilarious. Perfect costume for him.

The Bulldog is amazing too.

So...how do you get the background so nice and white without blowing the highlights on the dogs????

I am worrying about that with the santa shoot coming up, Santa and all that darn white beard. How did you do the lights in these?

Well, muscle cramps, facial tic, and lots of sweat - being that I'm 6'3" tall, and the pups...weren't! The shop owner looked at me afterwards when handing over the check, all wrinkled and dripping and disheveled...he shook his head, and goes, "Guess even photos are 'work'." Yah. And don't you forget it, bub.

The pup with the leaves and the scarf was a deliberate composition (I'm creative when exhausted!), I look in fashion magazines and clothing catalogs for ideas like that...and again one of those shots where you click 20 times and toss 19 of them away. Mostly it was three leaves and a tail, a foot, an out of focus head coming at me, etc.

White backgrounds are formulaic, and depending on subject size you need at least two - preferably three (two on the backdrop so that it's even with no hot spots) lights. When you're setting up for them, it's important to have a good distance between the subject and the vertical part of the background paper...in this case, with dogs, about 4 feet. So, roll the paper down from the wall or backdrop stand pretty far.

The idea is that one set of strobes is set for the subject, the other - independently - set for the white paper backdrop.

So first, pop in a teddy bear or something similar in tone to your subject, far forward where you'll have their "mark," and have just the main (key) strobe/light turned on. Dial in that exposure. I fine-tune with a gray & white card from there to make sure the highlights won't blow. Whole process takes just a few minutes of fiddling.

Then, set up one or two lights on the backdrop paper...they'll be a few feet back from the subject, and maybe even scrimmed so that flare won't occur in your lens (I hang black presentation boards from Office Depot). Now, with your camera already set to the key light and main subject, you'll adjust the intensity of the background light(s) only, until you blow them out, or just before - and voila.

A third light, too, can be added from directly above, to keep the horizontal part of hte white paper as close to all-white as possible.

Of course, the whole scheme goes to hell in a handbasket if you can't keep the pup in the forward area where you've metered for the key light, as the background lights will add to the exposure on the dog if it's too close to the back.

Regardless, afterwards, Photoshop is a fine tool for "wholly" whitening anything that remained partly gray.

Does that make sense?

This is a wonderful series but I would expect no less. I have the same props(got mine at big lots last year!) and may snag some of your ideas for my bichon bash this weekend.

These are just wonderful. Great subject taken to a better place than normally created. Simple, stunning and really fun. Kudos!