I am neck deep in processing work (a good problem to have as that means I am buried in work in a field I want to be in), so here are some photos from a test session that didn’t work out. Normally, I just post the stuff that I think is solid, but then I realized maybe that’s why all artists and photographers I aspire to be on the same level with always seem so much further out of my league: we never get to see their sessions that go wrong.
This started as a background test. With a dog. And bubbles. Now, I don’t know if you all have noticed but that dog is getting bigger. I suspect by this time next month he will be the size of a house. Well on the day I took these photos I neglected to consider his size and once I did, I was like “no problem, I will just crop it down in processing. Despite me wanting this to be quick that is a useful lesson:
Cropping only works if the subject is smaller than the area you want to crop down to.
For example, this dog is bigger than the background I wanted to crop down to. That means unless I want to pop open photoshop and slowly stitch together an extended background, there is simply no way to crop the photo down without cutting the poor puppy’s head and hind off. Thus, most of these pictures are cropped all the way down around his head.
The thing about that background, though, is that it is darker. Generally, I try to contrast my backgrounds. For example, if you have extremely pale skin, then you better believe we are breaking out darker colors for your background unless you have clothing that does that already. Which brings me to my point, this dog has very dark fur around his face. Putting a dark background behind him only made him darker to my camera’s sensor which made getting a focus on him a challenge. This was compounded by the fact that he is a puppy and puppies tend to move around a lot. Which brings me to another useful tip:
If you keep having issues during a photo session, you should stop and take a second to think and adjust.
At this point I should have rethought what was going wrong, what I was doing to prevent things from going right, and what could change to make things go better. I did not do this. It was at this point that the puppy decided he wanted to try and lick the bubbles. That made me chuckle and we wrapped up soon after that.
Finally, and I know this is repetitive at this point, but it always bears repeating:
If photographing pets, be nice to them and keep it fun regardless of how the session is going. They do not understand what you are doing but they are trying their best to make you happy, so you owe it to them to keep them happy.