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Everyone likes dogs. Right? 
I get lots of ideas for projects, but often fail to get them going or keep them going. The best advice I've read about project work is that the subject should be readily available. This one is just that. There's a chance of a picture any day of the week no matter what the weather or how short a time span available, and I don't have to travel far.
Dogs have featured in my photographs almost since I started using a camera with any serious intent back in the late 1970s. Usually candid snaps of dogs and their owners. Like this one:
It soon became clear to me that it's the relationship between dog and owner that makes dog pictures interesting. Keith Arnatt's series. Walking the Dog, has been a favourite of mine for some time, and Elliot Erwitt has also photographed a lot of dogs - DogDogs is a fun little book.
Visually I like the tension in the lead when dogs are being walked. Or is it the owner being walked?
It wasn't until early last year that I started to take dog photos with a bit more of a plan. As usual it came about by accident when I was playing around with a new camera to see how it handled for street photography. I got home and found that I had a number of pictures with dogs in them and something else was going on. Using a wide angle (28mm equivalent) lens and getting in quite close there's still a lot of background detail in the pictures. This began to get interesting too.
Long story short, I now look to try to get at least two dogs in the picture, something else going on in the background, or something quirky. I'm resisting the usual advice to isolate the subject and remove distractions. Nor does it bother me if the people in the pictures are looking at the camera, which is usually a no-no for candid photographs. In some of the pictures the dog/s are incidental, in others they're the main subject. Some pictures are easy to read, others need to be looked at closely to find what I saw. Some are just amusing - I hope. Another thing I'm not worrying about are the classic 'rules' of composition or having the picture level. Maybe looking at Tom Wood and Garry Winogrand's pictures has influenced me? I've certainly become interested in the way the frame chops things off, yet they help the balance of the image. Naturally enough a lot of picture get lost in the edit.
As I started off using micro four thirds I now crop everything to 4:3 for consistency. Rarely do I shoot from hip because although I take the pictures quickly I do frame them, albeit loosely. At some point I'll probably gather a selection of pictures which contain more than one dog as a set, call it 50 dogs (or however many there are) and make it a 'spot the dog' collection!
Here are a few from last year which I'd welcome feedback on. I'll put some more recent ones in another post below.
I get lots of ideas for projects, but often fail to get them going or keep them going. The best advice I've read about project work is that the subject should be readily available. This one is just that. There's a chance of a picture any day of the week no matter what the weather or how short a time span available, and I don't have to travel far.
Dogs have featured in my photographs almost since I started using a camera with any serious intent back in the late 1970s. Usually candid snaps of dogs and their owners. Like this one:
It soon became clear to me that it's the relationship between dog and owner that makes dog pictures interesting. Keith Arnatt's series. Walking the Dog, has been a favourite of mine for some time, and Elliot Erwitt has also photographed a lot of dogs - DogDogs is a fun little book.
Visually I like the tension in the lead when dogs are being walked. Or is it the owner being walked?
It wasn't until early last year that I started to take dog photos with a bit more of a plan. As usual it came about by accident when I was playing around with a new camera to see how it handled for street photography. I got home and found that I had a number of pictures with dogs in them and something else was going on. Using a wide angle (28mm equivalent) lens and getting in quite close there's still a lot of background detail in the pictures. This began to get interesting too.
Long story short, I now look to try to get at least two dogs in the picture, something else going on in the background, or something quirky. I'm resisting the usual advice to isolate the subject and remove distractions. Nor does it bother me if the people in the pictures are looking at the camera, which is usually a no-no for candid photographs. In some of the pictures the dog/s are incidental, in others they're the main subject. Some pictures are easy to read, others need to be looked at closely to find what I saw. Some are just amusing - I hope. Another thing I'm not worrying about are the classic 'rules' of composition or having the picture level. Maybe looking at Tom Wood and Garry Winogrand's pictures has influenced me? I've certainly become interested in the way the frame chops things off, yet they help the balance of the image. Naturally enough a lot of picture get lost in the edit.
As I started off using micro four thirds I now crop everything to 4:3 for consistency. Rarely do I shoot from hip because although I take the pictures quickly I do frame them, albeit loosely. At some point I'll probably gather a selection of pictures which contain more than one dog as a set, call it 50 dogs (or however many there are) and make it a 'spot the dog' collection!
Here are a few from last year which I'd welcome feedback on. I'll put some more recent ones in another post below.
