scruffy dog photography | best professional pet photographer blog serving Toronto and Ontario » creativity

can i borrow your sky? ~ {Ontario professional pet photographer}

illona — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:46:16 +0000

with probably 80% of the scruffy dog images being shot in the great outdoors, throughout all the seasons, Mother Nature definitely plays her hand in the scheduling. ask any scruffy client who’s anxiously watched first the long-range, then the short-range weather reports … then turned their eyes to the skies, and finally picked up the phone to discuss the logistics of having me drive to Toronto or Hamilton or London. “So is it raining there right now?” “What direction are the clouds coming from?”

sure, it’s always a gamble, but so far we’ve never gotten wet and it’s always been fun. and if shoots have to be rebooked, we rebook. no big deal. the scruffy dog schedule is laid out specifically to keep room for rain dates.

what we can’t always book for is those perfect skies. sometimes it’s just flat and overcast. and quite frankly, that diffused light is the best, but it doesn’t make for a very appealing back drop. so sometimes i have to get a little crafty to take an image from drab to ‘finished’.

in this case, sweet old man Oswin here was lacking a little zip in his sky …

so i went to previous client Riley’s shoot and borrowed his sky for a bit … (he didn’t mind. he had lots of sky over those wheat fields)

and voila … the finished piece:

and here’s another example:

having said all that, i will admit that i’m something of a purist: although the post work on your finished images is careful and extensive, and i remove leashes and other background clutter on any images that go to print, i generally won’t photoshop in anything that isn’t truly there. and yes, i’ve had some pretty weird requests, but we won’t go there.

conversions ~ {professional pet photographer}

illona — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:14:01 +0000

i’ve had a number of email inquiries lately from upcoming clients regarding conversions and whether i do them since there really aren’t that many seen in the regular blog entries. well, i’ll admit … in spite of being an old-school b&w film shooter from years … er … decades ago, and loving b&w and other conversions, i am desperately in love with colour. not just that, but i am downright anal about colour management, saturation and tone, light and white balance … and even after i’ve done conversions, and those b&w’s or aged versions absolutely wow me, i’m still more inclined to show you the colour version. why? because it’s often colour that is the greatest feat.

colour management is one of the reasons i encourage clients to come to the studio consult. saturation, tone, contrast and so many other aspects of the images can change — sometimes drastically — from monitor to monitor, and even from browser to browser; with different browsers using different colour management tools, their results end up sometimes miles away from one another in spite of carefully managed and saved colour profiles at the photographer’s end. when clients come in for their studio consult they are able to see the images on a large-format monitor which is regularly and carefully colour-calibrated and kept in check with the various labs used to print the high-end prints and products scruffy dog offers.

still, some images beg to be converted …

… or given a special treatment …

the following are the typical conversions you get within your regular scruffy dog client gallery:

… as if the scruffy dog client galleries weren’t large enough!

hope this helps those who have been inquiring. wags!