A golden hour pet photoshoot just outside of Birmingham Alabama. We visited the quiet hills of this little farm and were treated with the most incredible sunset!
There are certain elements in life
that make the world feel like a much a smaller place.
Dog sports is one of them.
I first photographed two of her pups at a seminar that was hosted near Birmingham, Alabama, by my friends from Utah. What are the chances, right?My friends had contacted me just a few weeks after I had moved down to south and said they had been asked to come out and host a training seminar. They invited me to come out, jump my dog and take some photos.
I made some great friends through this event, and Katie was one of them!
As it turned out, Katie and I had a lot more in common than just dock diving too! She was also training her Malinois pup in bite work, and she was a life-long equestrian.
This is Roper, Katie's seasoned dock dog. This boy is fast, and he can really fly! I took this photo of them at the training seminar where we met.
One day Katie messaged me about getting some photos of her and her animals as a Christmas gift for her mom. Animal photos? Twist my arm, haha. I was instantly on board. As we started making plans I found out that she actually had six pups total! She also had a very special horse named Litely, a 32 year old mare she had bred and raised herself. Talk about a life-long friend!
Katie's goal was just ONE photo with Litely's ears up and everyone else behaving to some degree. I was pretty confident we could make this happen! As we started working on the details of her shoot, she mentioned that one of her dogs was a bit reactive and she wasn't sure how he would do in the group setting. No problem, I told her we would do whatever we needed to in order to keep everyone safe and happy, (even if that meant photoshopping him into the scene). She said that he was typically well-behaved if he was on leash and had enough personal space away from the other dogs.
Rugar is Katie's Malinois puppy. He was about 6 months old in this photo and already loving the game!
It was a familiar and convenient place for everyone, not to mention the quiet atmosphere and gorgeous scenery.
Thankfully we had a few friends on set with us to help wrangle dogs and get everyone in position. While Katie and Mary Alice worked on getting all of the pups ready for their closeups, I spent some time with this sweet old girl. She wasn't the main focus of our shoot, but I couldn't help giving her the spotlight. She was the picture of health for a horse her age. Her soft eyes and quiet energy resonated with me and reminded me so much of what I missed about my own horse, who passed away 2 years ago.
I had been warned in advance that the most difficult part of my job would be to get a photo with Litely's ears forward.
This is a big detail when you are photographing horses! "Ears up" Is the equivalent of making sure someone's eyes are open in a photo. I have a few tricks up my sleeve to make this happen, but Litely was pretty immune to most of them. After over 30 years of life, there's not too much to worry about as a horse, so I couldn't really blame her! I was able to get just a couple photos of her ears forward, but getting 6 dogs to also cooperate at the same time was a miracle I wasn't holding my breath for.
So what to do?
A trick us photographers use in these situations is called composite photos. This is a technique of combining two or more images to get a desired result- in this case, a family photo with everyone paying attention. It can be quite challenging to seamlessly place elements from different photos together. You have to take into consideration things like naturally occurring shadows and lighting, perspective (making sure the size of objects is relative to their surrounding) making sure that there aren't any unnatural lines and that added or removed objects blend smoothly with their surroundings.
I made sure to take lots of group photos so that I had a lot of options to make a composite from. When it came time to create the image, this is the one I ended up using as my "base". Katie mentioned how much she loved her little dog Oliver's expression, and how all of the dogs were visible and attentive. The only thing we needed to fix was taking Mary Alice out (she is holding Clint's leash- he's our reactive boy,) and getting some nice forward ears on Litely. This photo is straight from my camera.
This was the final result!
Mission Accomplished!
While its always easier to try and get something like this "in camera" (during the shoot), sometimes its less stress for the animals and humans to just take care of it "in post"(post shoot, during the editing process). Photos like this can be a lot of work to create, but it's an incredibly handy skill to have when you are dealing with a lot of moving parts- or puppies, hah! Katie was thrilled with the final result, and she chose to have this photo printed as a canvas to give to her mom for Christmas.
After the group shot we took some time to get some photos of her and her Malinois puppy Rugar. This little boy is super fun and photogenic. Their bond was an easy one to capture and I can't wait to see what the future holds for them as a team!
