SILHOUETTE - Dog Photographer 52 Week Project - Week 8
I love silhouette photography. I always have. When I think of silhouettes, I think of being on a beach with the sun setting, big blue skies and some puffy clouds to help create drama. When I was at the Retreats by BARKgraphy southern California retreat, we got a lot of those skies. This is one of my favorite images from that trip.
Since I don't live near the beach and I'm supposed to take photos this week for our theme, I needed to come up with another plan.
Monday February 19 was President's Day in the US so kids were out of school. Since Kelly my photography assistant is 15, I knew she'd be home so I'd planned for her to help me. I wanted to go to Crowders Mountain about 45 minutes from my house to take some sunset and silhouette photos.
The key to taking silhouette photos is positioning yourself below your subject so that there is nothing but sky behind them. In the top photo in this post, the ocean is behind the dogs and it almost doesn't work but you can still see the outline of the dogs against it. I got lucky.
I decided to take our new dog Molly on an adventure. There are some rock formations at Crowders Mountain and I knew I could get her on them to take a few silhouettes. She'd be up high and I could easily get below her. However the weather on Monday didn't cooperate with my plan. The day started out rainy. The rain stopped but the day and evening were completely overcast and gray. Since I knew it was my only chance to have an assistant, I didn't cancel but I did change venues. <insert sad emoji here>
We went to another park about 30 minutes from my house that I don't go to very often. They're pretty strict on photography rules. The park requires a membership and my membership is about to expire so I figured we'd go. I was hoping to find an area where I could put Molly up high but even in the more open spaces, there were still trees behind her.
While it was still too bright to really try silhouettes, we were near some picnic tables so I resorted to putting her on one. Needless to say, this isn't what I had in mind. The first photo is the original photo and following are two edited photos, neither of which I like. Again, this wasn't what I was hoping to achieve this week. I still need to keep looking for a good spot to do silhouettes around where I live. Some place where I can get a nice profile shot of my subject.... that is the goal. And if you look in the bottom right hand corner of the first photo.... you can see treetops. errrr my gaaahd I can't get away from them!
Totally gray skies don't make for great silhouette photos. Molly was rather confused about why I was crouching below her too.
The photo above I cropped it a bit and made a few adjustments in lightroom and photoshop (to remove the trees in the bottom righthand corner, the leash and the handler.)
I didn't like the result of the previous photo so I played around in Topaz and created this high key image.
This is going to be one of those blog posts I'm going to see later and think, did I really post that for the public to see? #trytryagain
This is a blog circle and next up is Wag to my Heart Photographer, Danyel Rogers, providing photography needs for the Portland Metro area. I can't wait to see what those who live near the beach do this week!