Different Perspective: Pet Photography Project 52, Week 4

Our theme this week is Different Perspective. If you remember at the end of last week's post, I mentioned I was photographing 2 dobermans. Well, I did but the session didn't go exactly as planned. Let me introduce you to Boston and Griffin, two beautiful dobie sisters.

Boston - a beautiful blue doberman.

Griffin - this image isn't super sharp. I had Boston's leash in my left hand and my camera with the 70-200mm lens on in my right hand. That's a lot of camera to hold with one hand.

I met the two of them and their mom through Instagram last summer. Their handle is @dobiesisters. I put out a model call this past summer when I needed to find dogs to photograph at a couple of the local breweries to be used in a local magazine. @dobiesisters volunteered and that's how we met.

We've been talking about getting together again and decided to this week. The weather was perfect. It is January but it was sunny and around 65°. We were on the outskirts of uptown Charlotte so I figured that meant there would be lots of people around given the weather. There were. And lots of dogs.

For this session, I was attempting to do something I've not done a lot of previously. We were using a more urban setting, trying to capture the fact that we are in Charlotte so we went to the Carolina Panthers stadium first. There are huge statues of the Panthers outside of the stadium. I thought it'd be cool to have the dogs in front of the statues, I'd get down low and shoot up to get these tall, leggy girls and the statues in the photos. Right? Wrong!

Boston and Griffin outside of the Carolina Panthers stadium.

Well, you'd think with all my previous dog experience that it might occur to me that Boston and Griffin might find the statues scary. They did. Growling and barking ensued so we came up with plan B.

During the shoot, I'd planned to incorporate this week's "different perspective" theme into some of the shots too. I envisioned photographing one dog in the distance while being framed by the legs of the other dog. That didn't happen and because I was holding one of the dogs a good part of the time (while photographing the other one.) Does holding onto the leash of a 90lb dog in a busy area with lots of distractions while trying to photograph the other dog count as a different perspective? LOL! It was certainly different for me! 

I wish I had a behind the scenes shot of this one. I was using a 16-35mm lens. I was on my side in a pretty uncomfortable position trying like heck to get both dogs and that Panther logo in the shot. I had a squeaky noise in hand too so the dogs would look at me and not at their mom who is holding onto both leashes camera right. Each dog had on 2 collars and a scarf. I gave up trying to photoshop all of the collars out. (please do not zoom in on these... it is not pretty!) And if I'm being completely transparent here, this is a composite and not a very good one at that. Perhaps I'll share next week the 2 before shots and how I did this. Trust me, it's really not the way a composite image should be done. Oh well.... this isn't for a competition and I got what I wanted: both dogs looking at me and the Panther logo in the shot.

Next time we decided we'd only bring one dog along or we'd have another handler available. All 4 of us had fun but as I mentioned, it didn't go as planned.  Instead of creating images with a different perspective, I was the one with the different perspective. That still counts, right? 

This is a blog circle and next up is Ono Pet Photography. Be sure to click the link at the bottom of each post to see what each photographer does with our topic this week.