It's week 29 of the 52 week dog photography project and our topic is sky. It's been humid and very sticky and hot outside so the thought of getting out with Moose, finding an open field to try to get some sky in the photo for this week's post just wasn't very appealing. (Just keeping it real, folks. :)) Since my full time job is walking dogs, I'm out in the heat every day and once I'm done with those walks, I'm generally content to stay in the a/c for the rest of the day.

The exception to that though is if I'm photographing a client's dog. Then I'm all about being outside. I wish this topic had been a week or two later. I'm photographing a great dane this Sunday at Lake Norman. I'll have tons of sky shots then!

Since I don't have a ton of photos with the sky in them, I thought I'd take the oppotunity to try and do a sky replacement for the first time. Figuring out how to do this has been on my list of things to learn, I just haven't made time for it. This is yet another reason why I enjoy this group. It helps me learn and experienment.

When I was in Cape Cod in April, the first morning we loaded my friend's bernese mountain dogs into the car and headed for the beach. It was really overcast and gloomy. I thought I'd take one of those photos and try a sky replacement. 

Here are 3 edits of the same photo: the first with the sky replacement, the 2nd which is edited with the way the sky looked that day and the original. The sky photo I used was a shot I took in Costa Rica. So this is a Costa Rica sky over Cape Cod sand. "Costa Cape ??" 

I found a few videos to watch about sky replacements. The first one honestly wasn't much help. It was a sky replacement of a city scape and the straight lines of the buildings were much easier to work with than Hailey's fur in this shot. I'd love some suggestions / critiques on this photo: How in the world do you replace a sky around the dog's fur so it doesn't look like you've done it? I know to non-photographers this probably looks okay but I'd really like to know how to do it well.

Did I just pick a super hard photo to try for my first time because of Hailey's long hair blowing in the breeze? I know I saw on another site recently that sky replacements are easier with short haired dogs. Do most dog photographer who are going to do this make certain their model has short hair? I really am curious. I look forward to playing around with sky replacements more in the future.

Until then... this is a blog circle and next up is Linda of DogShotzPhotography serving the Indianapolis IN area. Keep clicking the links at the bottom of each post until you end up back here.