Weekend Portraits

The past few weeks, our house has resembled the movie, Pet Hotel. First, we had one of our 7-month-old puppies visit for a week -- RamZ (Annihaus RJM Chef Ramsay's Risotto). Then, the day he left, we got Duke (CH Lanahaus True Grit V Rowdy) and another of our 7-month-old puppies, CocoBear (Annihaus RJM Coq Au Bear-Nais). That gave their brother, Scampy (Annihaus RJM Scampi Fra Diavolo) plenty of play time running after or away from them in the yard. Of course, nothing is easy and we discovered CocoBear was in her first heat cycle. We discovered that because her big "brother" Duke howled all night. So, when it was time to return the duo to their owners, we decided to keep CocoBear until she's out of heat and we returned Duke.

Then, we got the puppies' daddy, Max, for a long weekend. Max is Ch Beachwalker Rowdy To The Max and he's stayed with us for weeks at a time ever since he was a baby. He met his two kids, liked them both and licked CocoBear's ears from the other side of the gate that separates the dining room from the living room. Sigh. He also howled.

However, on Saturday, Linda and I realized we had a somewhat unique situation with Max here and so we set up a photo shoot. Because CocoBear was in heat, we knew we couldn't put Max together with the kids for a series of shots so we opted to shoot them separately and merge the images together. Here's the result of that effort with, from L to R, CocoBear, Max and Scamp.



Once we completed that series of shots, we realized that we had another unique opportunity: our boy Rowdy, who left us a few years ago, had three litters in his lifetime. This weekend, we had puppies from each of those litters: CassidyAnn from the first litter; Harry Potter from the second; and Max from the last. So, we created this portrait appropriately titled "The Rowdy Kids". From L to R, Cassidy, Max and Harry Potter.



We did the entire shoot in less than an hour. The older dogs are used to portrait shoots so they handled it with total aplomb and the two puppies were surprisingly easy to shoot. Max, who is very animated and smiles a lot normally, is VERY SERIOUS when you point a camera at him. Still, these images will make several owners very happy.

Saturday night, when the "Big Moon" was high in the sky, I mixed things up and captured this image of the Man In The Moon. Hope you like it.



Jim

Hey Jim,

Beautifully done. I very much respect photographing the flat black rottie coats on the black background.

James

PS The moon is cool too. :P

I'd like to echo James' comment. Amazing images, Jim. And, the expression on each of the dogs' faces is precious.

Bernd

Thanks for your comments guys. James, I know you can appreciate this but we have very little "studio space" in the new house so I have to use backgrounds I can make disappear due to light leakage behind them. I've tried all of my standards but black is always the best. And I love the way it helps with composites/blends. Jim Poor has his reflective look which distinguishes his work and I've always liked the low-key look for my Rottie portraits. I used the same background for the moon shot .

Jim

I love your pictures they are very nice. I always have problems getting darker dogs nice on a picture. Nice job!

Thank you Evita. I light the dogs with two Alien Bee 400s about 10 feet away with the primary light bounced off an Alien Bee PLM and the fill off a silver umbrella. I dial down the fill to about 3/4. I find that lighting wraps the light around the black dogs and lets you pull them off of the background fairly easily. In film days, nobody ever did this in color. In the darkroom, you could dodge the dogs and burn the background in B&W but for color, you'd almost always lose the dog. With digital, you can create layers with the dogs on a layer that you can enhance and the background on a layer you can take to total black. Glad you like the results.

Jim