Photographing Your Dog in Wildflowers
April 13, 2010 by Paris and John
Filed under Tips
In this part of Texas, taking family photos in a field of bluebonnets is an April must-do. Children kneel or sit in the fragrant fields and families snap the obligatory bluebonnet photo.
So we decided we needed to take the flower photo with our dogs. The problem? Bluebonnets are typically found (usually because they’re seeded by the highway department) right along the roadside, and often busy roads at that. Our dogs are country dogs and definitely do not want to pose for photos alongside the interstate highways.
We have a small, small patch of bluebonnets at home. They came up on their own….but they didn’t come up in an ideal location. They’re located right next to our fence, creating a distracting background.
So we worked around it.
We focused on a single flower.
Putting our dog Tiki in a sit behind the flower, we focused on the bluebonnet itself. A shallow depth of field placed Tiki in a dreamy blur of a background…which also blurred out much of the fence. We used the “rubber stamp” tool in Photoshop to remove the fence post and cropped the photo from a vertical to a horizontal format. Here was the original shot:
In the above two photos and in the one below, we also photographed from a low position, sitting on the ground and holding the camera low. This puts the focal point of the photo on the flowers and on Tiki:
Another option is to photograph your dog in the flowers from directly above your dog, cutting out the distracting background so only your dog and the photos are in the shot:
Of course, the fun photos are the ones you just happen to snap!
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