some of my best friends are dogs East - West : Darwin & Maggie guarding the perimeter against intruders.

Darwin & Maggie keeping a lookout for intruders. Thanks for any

constructive feedback.

Gordon, this is a great picture! I like dogs and see so many cute pictures of dogs but this has got form, shape and balance; almost like those two snow covered cars you shot and posted a short while ago. I think the balance is due to the cut off nose of the bottom dog is showing in the top dog and the top of the top dog's head that is cut off is shown in the bottom dog.

 

Kirk

Thanks. You total got what I was trying for with this shot. It sure is nice to know that I'm not the only one. I never sweat about ratings but I did notice that something else this image has in common with the, two snow covered trucks, shot you mentioned is that it garnered two 3/3s within minutes of being posted. Apparently visual puns annoy some people :)

Nope. I think the balance is the perfect ear alignment.

 

In any case, it's a great photo. With all this white, you'd expect a washout somewhere and there is none.

 

Great job. Lucky dog owner. They're beauties for sure.

 

Cheers ~

Gordon ... This is quite an interesting composition and it works quite well. I get the feeling from this that Darwin and Maggie are telling each other ... "I got your back covered." Maybe they're getting ready to rob the local pet store?

I see the ears as the anchor to the shot. The ears being stacked up that way, pulls my eyes back to the centre when they want to wander out of the frame looking for the missing nose and skull top. The interplay of those two aspects, is what makes this one work for me.

You got that right! These two are partners in crime most of the time. If they knock over the local pet food store I hope they come back with lots of bags of food. I have a feeling that, being the delinquents that they are, they would only grab all the doggy toys and treats and leave the dog food behind :)

I like the way you have composed this two heads, so different but both have the "alert" look, like each is whatching another side of events.... ready!( is there food in the neighborhood?...LOL)I like the way they are placed on the frame,more body in the FG and more head in the BG.

 

Lovely pair, Darwin and Maggie ;-))

This is aswesome cropping and focus! I love these two dogs...You're in great company! Beautiful photograph!

Great fun Gordon!!!

Off topic but I think you'll really enjoy this portfolio if you haven't seen it: Jana Vanourkova

Best,

john

Gordon with doggie photo's you can always win me over (got two black labradors myself)Apart from that it's a strikingly beautiful portrait.

 

(agree with John on Jana's portfolio)

Perfect. Tense and still beautiful. I love the front-most dog's eye, so watchful and intelligent. I also like how you've arranged the dogs so they have all their bases covered. Stupid 3/3's. Obviously cat-lovers (or cat-burglars).

Ha. These guards are full of personality, even when they seem to be a little too relaxed while on duty.

Hello, Gordon. As a massive dog lover myself, I can tell this was a peaceful and ordinary moment for these two. It's just how they operate. You captured it so well.

Gord, this is a great picture of Maggie and Darwin. I was watching Crufts last night and there was this lovely fluffy Samoyed - the long white coat immediately made me think of Maggie and Darwin, and then when I looked on here you had uploaded another picture of them!

 

I like the composition here. That missing nose somehow sends my eyes in a circle around the picture to meet the nose at the top. I guess that is where I get the Ying and Yang feeling from.

"Which way did they go...."! It's a lovely portrait of the two dogs but I find the detail and the "gentle eye" on the foreground dog very appealing. Your exposure on their white fur is just perfect. The ears have a nice vertical alignment and the eyes have that diagonal pull that keeps a person glancing back and forth at the image.

The way you conceive images is so often so very instructive, and this one is a great example. Kirk's comments (and your response) really focused me on an important part of your thought process that I'm not sure I'd have apprehended by myself. I feel like I've just learned an important compositional concept that can apply in many situations, and like Darwin's egg, something I would have been hard pressed to invent is now obvious to me. Great stuff!

 

I'm also fascinated by the in focus right-facing and out of focus left-facing dogs who could be one in the same, symbolically, one part clearly seeing one way, while another part gazes softly in reverse... present and past, forward and back... and like that. Probably over interpreting here, but it's part of what this image brings to my mind. In any case, I appreciate you sharing your vision, your thinking, *and* your dogs!

More and more, I am enamoured with framing. I've been thinking of starting a forum thread, and perhaps will, on the subject. In my travels around PN, the critique most often offered is the cropping suggestion. Almost as often as new crop suggestions are offered, they are misguided. Since what we choose to frame through our lens is so personal and so much a part of the individual vision, we probably have the tendency to re-visualize everything framed to our liking, therefore often missing the point of others' visions. (Of course, there are times when a cropping suggestion turns an ordinary photo into a great one.) Sometimes photographic statements are made with light, sometimes purely content, sometimes the play of colors. The essence of this photo seems to be the framing. I've always tried to articulate what I think is the difference between talking about "framing" and talking about "composition." I think this photo is it. Because I think composition is mostly about what we see, but framing can be as much about what we don't see as what we do, what's on the periphery, what a good photographer makes us see in our mind's eye in addition to what he presents overtly. While I feel a lot of warmth here, there's a minimalist aspect to this. It avoids the extraneous and uses what's important both to tell a story and to impart much more than what is actually before us.

Pnina;

 

No food used in the making of this photo:) If they saw any food they would both be looking in the same direction.

 

Diana;

 

Thanks, these two dogs are my company most of every day and yes I am a lucky guy.

 

John;

 

Yup, I had fun doing this. I always enjoy following them around looking for shots. Thanks for the link to Jana's portfolio. I love her work. I was checking in on her even before I became a member on this site. I think her portfolio was the first one I commented on. Jana and I often exchange comments. I am in awe of her skills in photo shop and her eye.

 

Ton;

 

Labs are such gentle and wise souls. I had a black lab as a young boy and he was my best friend. You'll have to post some shots of your two.

 

Jeff;

 

I got a kick out of your notion of arranging these two. I just follow them around with the camera. It is not that they lack obedience, but if I tell them to sit and stay, they get these dopey looks on their faces and it is a dead give away that they have been posed. I had completely overlooked those darn cat lovers, that surely explains why they those 3s showed up so fast.

 

Joseph;

 

LOL I won't tell them that you think they are slackers, they think they have me fooled.

 

Liz;

 

I somehow knew that you were a dog person :) You understand what I captured here. It is completely voyeuristic, as this is what they are up to, one way or another, most of the day.

 

Pete;

 

Thanks for letting me in on your impression. To keep your eye moving around the frame was indeed my goal. The yin yang I can also see.

 

Susan;

 

You and I have discussed working Pyrs. before, so I'm not surprised that you could tell exactly what these two were thinking. They have pretty much driven off anything that walks on the ground, so they now have to resort to scaring off crows and buzzards.

 

David;

 

Thanks as alway for your insightful comment. Your thoughts about each of these dogs being part of a greater whole is quite accurate to my mind. Being brother and sister they have an amazingly tight bond. They have radically opposite personalities in most ways. They seem to complete one another in much the same way as the part of Darwin that run out of frame shows up in Maggie and visa versa. I do not think you are reaching with your interpretation. I find it marvelous and inspired, that you confer my dog portrait the same depth of thought that would go to a human portrait.

 

Fred;

 

You have raised some interesting points and I agree this could make an wonderful forum thread. Cropping is a very personal choice. For me it is often a difficult one. This was cropped pretty much in camera with only the slightest of crops afterwards to straighten the imagine. I find that when I view a scene I compose more by considering what I do not want in my frame than most other criteria. I see cropping as an act of exclusion.

 

 

 

Yet another interesting distinction between cropping in camera and post cropping. I wish there were two different words. I also find myself trying to compose in the camera so as not to need too much cropping, but I do find there are times when I will purposely include more in my shot, knowing that I will crop down later. Some of that is because, honestly, I'm sometimes just not sure in the moment whether a certain element will work for me or not and need the objectivity of looking at it later and not through the camera to make certain decisions. I've also experienced some of those happy accidents where I realize that what I thought would be a good long shot actually contains a gem when I close in on some detail and exclude what I thought would be necessary environment. In any case, I think this photograph is a case of intentional, meaningful, and successful framing.

Thanks for sharing. I enjoy hearing how you approach this aspect. I do agree that two separate terms would be useful.

 

Old habits die hard for me and I have always tried to maximize my use of the film/sensor. Although I used the same approach with medium format and film, I am loving the more generous nature of digital. I try to get the shot I want in the frame but I then back off and recompose and sometime just fire away a few extra shots in case something appears later. This shot just happened to work out without much cropping.

 

BTW The session this image came from, was a series of shots trying to work with DOF and the relationship between two subjects in a portrait. I had your inspirational work with men, in natural light indoors uppermost in my mind, despite the fact I was working with dogs, in natural light outdoors.

This photo reminds me of Tim Flach's studies on animals, sharp and great usage of DOF with a great posture for the two dogs. Good job Gordon!

A wonderful, striking image, Gordon. (Of course you're got the two happiest, hammiest, and most photogenic models in dogdom.) Warm regards...

This photo is wonderful. I like the composition very much. And off course the fact that you have photographed your dogs. I have two tibetan mastiffs myself and I hope that one day I can make such a nice shot of them as the one you posted here. Thanks for the inspiration.

I love the way one dog's head is looking opposite the other...I can almost read their thoughts! Great photo; thank you for sharing. :)