Our old puppy

[2u77matt]

Well, all the recent dog pictures inspired me to share the start of my new project. I could certainly use some constructive criticism, because I'm very much a novice and would like to do a good job of this for my wife. I'm trying to put together an album of our 14 yr. old dog, Gruntz. Unfortunately we have some sad days ahead as he has cancer and doesn't have much longer. He still treats each day like a puppy though and the vet already calls him a miracle dog for his high spirits. He's been my wife's companion since she was 13 yrs old, so it's going to be tough for her. I have lots of activity type snap shots from over the years, so now I'm trying to capture some of his expressions and a high quality portrait or two now that I'm learning the DSLR.

Here's my favorite so far. I was trying to capture his old, longing eyes as he watched cars out the front window. I could use some tips on lighting/composition. I took this with out flash as I haven't really liked my results with a flash (in camera) so far. I'd like to get a little lower and in front of him, but then he always looks right at me and tries to lick the lens!

And here are two more from a walk in the woods. These aren't as sharp as I hoped, but were just fun shots I wanted to share. I'm having trouble getting sharp pics with good color in these snowy conditions. Any tips?

His version of a smile:

Taking a break for a snowcone!

[SKIPPERS KID]

Well I am sorry to here this, What can I say we all have been here I have been at this point three times and it is never good. Well I Hope you all take care and remember the good photo's that you have and the good days you have. There is a good home for him my three are there and I pray that they are still pointing Birds. I do now what you are feeling it is hard. So just feel free to vent here we will help if we can and help your wife out the best you can this is hard for every one. God Bless your Dog and your family

[Steve Foss]

Matt, I'm sorry to hear that you and your wife will be losing such a loved companion. It's cool that he remains in good spirits.

In taking the second image as an example (it's the most challenging one since Gruntz is moving toward the camera), I see from your exif data that you shot at 1/2000 and f2.8. That's plenty of shutter speed for you to get a sharp image, and in fact the image is not too soft to use.

I'm not sure what lens you're using, but the fact that it's an f2.8 lens tells me it's likely a good one. With the 20D and a good lens, if you're in Al servo focus mode and using the center focus point, the camera/lens combo will be plenty adequate to keep focus on a dog walking toward you. I've used that body for sports and birds in flight on Al servo, and you can do good things with it. If your camera was in one-shot focus mode, it will not continually track a moving subject, and if you lock focus and shoot on a subject moving toward you in that focus mode, you'll almost always get slightly out of focus shots.

I'm not sure how conversant you are yet with the camera, so I'll explain a bit. If you already know this, cool. Al servo is the focus mode for moving subjects. The camera continually senses the subject and adjusts focus as it moves. Selecting the center point manually for focus (pretty much always recommended with the 20D as that is the most precise and effective focus point) speeds up and helps focusing ability, because if you just leave all the points active and allow the camera to do the thinking as to which to use in a certain situation, it slows things down.

Of course, with the center point selected, you have to keep it on the part of the subject you want in focus. In the case of people/animals/birds, it's almost always the face/eye, and with the lens at f2.8, you've got a very shallow depth of focus. The closer you are to the subject (at a constant aperture), the shallower the DOF. So when you're filling the screen with the face of Gruntz, you may find very little in focus and want to stop down the lens (increase f-stop number) to f5.6 or f8, for example. When he's farther away, the DOF will appear deeper and it won't be as much of an issue. Taking the second image as an example again, your DOF is fine, I just think the camera missed focus.

So, which focus mode were you using for the moving shots?

You can also use exposure compensation. All three of these images are slightly underexposed, which is very common with a dark subject against snow. Exposure compensation simply allows you to turn the back dial to over or underexpose the image. The in camera metering tries to render things as mid-tones, so snow pics generally come out too dark. If you overexpose one stop in these pics of Gruntz, they would turn out well.

How to know if you've gone too far with overexposure? When you view the image on the back of the camera in the mode that shows you the histogram, and spots on the image that are too overexposed will blink, and that tells you to back off on the overexposure. So if you have an EC of +1 (one full stop overexposed), you might back down to +2/3 or +1/3.

Using the second image again, overexposing one full stop would drop your shutter speed from 1/2000 to 1/1000, and if you stopped down your aperture to f4 it would drop ss to 1/500, with 1/250 ss if you stopped down to f5.6 to gain more depth of focus. And 1/500 or 1/250 may be too slow to get sharp images (depending on your lens and technique). But you shot at iso100, and you can easily gain back two stops of shutter speed by bumping to iso400. The sensor on the 20D is excellent, and at iso400 you'll get high image quality with very litte noise, so for most shooting that's what I leave my iso set at, with the ability to adjust as lighting allows.

That's all a bit to learn if you haven't had that experience yet. And if you know all that, sorry. If not, it should be a starting point. All the features I mentioned are detailed in the owner's manual, so you can look up focus modes, focus point selection and exposure compensation and the manual will tell you how to adjust them.

For your close-ups of Gruntz, using the camera's own pop-up flash with the camera set in the P mode will make things easy for you and should help a lot. Not sure whether you have an additional flash or how much experience you have with flash, but if you haven't done much flash work and don't have larger flash, these modern generations of DSLRs are very smart about giving you a good exposure on close subjects.

I see you're using and old version of Photoshop Elements. While you have some limits with that, you should be able to lighten the images, which are a bit underexposed, and you should be able to do some sharpening, as well.

Hope this helps, good luck with the project and keep asking questions if you have problems.

[finnbay]

I like the pose and the mood this photo conveys.

On the other hand, we lost one of our labs to cancer last summer and my 16 year old springer shortly before that. I certainly understand the emotions that go along with that. I only wish that I had taken more photos before they left us.

[WifeKidsandDog]

First of all, I'm sorry for what you're going through. I haven't been there yet but thinking about it brings tears to my eyes, so I can only image how sad a time it is for you and your wife.

Secondly, the first photo is beautiful, I like the tones and the mood. The only suggestion I would make is that if you feel comfortable post processing, I would make the catchlight in the eye a bit bigger. I normally hate to post process eyes because, well, I just don't like to, but I think in this shot it would add something.

Cheryl

[Dbl]

First 2u77matt I wish you all the best in the upcoming days with your dog. We have all had to go through through these life experiences. The first thing that you are doing correctly is to try and get as many shots as you can of Gruntz. You are well on the way, a nice photo will be great but I would really just concentrate on getting as many pictures as you can of your friend doing the things he has always done.

Good luck with Guntz and cherish your upcoming time with him.

[perch_destroyer]

Dang, thats too bad, very sad, I got a 10 year old who is getting close to getting to that age. Great photos's. the Perch

[2u77matt]

Sorry I haven't responded sooner after asking for advice . . . I'm just getting over my Packer depression LOL.

Thanks for all the tips. I tried the exposure compensation advice for snowy pictures and it made a huge difference. I'm slowly making my way along the learning curve.

I owe an explanation on the lens for the last two images. I bought a Sigma 70-210 2.8 dirt cheap as a "project." It's one of the older, non-compatible Sigma lenses so it only works at max aperture. I have some experience programming the type of chip used in the lens and I have access to a pretty nice logic analyzer, so I thought it'd be "fun" to try to resurrect it's full functionality. My initial investigation has confirmed that I'm nuts and the job is going to be really big, so it remains to be seen how far I take it. In the mean-time, I have a really big, heavy lens stuck at f2.8

[Steve Foss]

matt, if it's gotta be stuck somewhere, that's the best place. Does it autofocus?

[2u77matt]

It does autofocus just fine. As far as I can tell, everything communicates correctly until it tries to change the aperture at which point it goes to err99. I think the problem is either the lens is trying to draw more power than the camera expects, or there has been a subtle change in the communication protocol such as requiring the lens to verify it received the command. It is very limiting as to what kinds of shots I can take, but for $80 it's an interesting project and a feature that you normally pay big bucks for.