Pet Portrait Photography Competition - 1st Place
More info on how to enter click here:
Pet Portrait Competition
Congratulatons to
Martin Robinson
from Manchester, England with his 1st place.
Martin tells us - Soul Searching. This image is very special to me, it is of our family dog Loki. He was very poorly a month before this was taken and very nearly, didn't pull through. Against the odds though, he did!
I wanted to create an image that not only pushed my skills in camera and editing to the limits, but was also something special to celebrate Loki still being around. It was taken in my small home studio, which is around 3 meters x 3 meters. Whenever we work in here, we need to be creative with the space, lighting and posing.
I wanted to try and achieve something very simple, but perfected to really take us back to basics.
So we decided to try a black background, with a black dog.
The image itself was fairly simple as far as composition goes, however the lighting, positioning and editing was probably one of the most complex I have needed to do yet. Loki's fur is very dark, with lots of deep curls which suck the light in but doesn't release it very well.
We had to position him a good 8 meters away from the backdrop, which meant re-arranging the kitchen and living room to make space. Luckily it is open plan in length, so we positioned Loki looking straight down the lens. The key light was my Godox 300 in a 105 Rice Bowl, with a kicker to add a touch of separation in a grided beauty dish. To get enough light into those deep curls, the key light needed to be on full power in Butterfly pattern. We also used a silver reflector to bounce light back into the chest area. In post production the edit was quite minimal really, clever use of radials to soften the light fall off, a clean up around the face and contour of his fluff. The final image was exactly how I saw it in my minds eye, I was very happy with the final outcome and the print hangs with pride in my Office. (Taken on my Canon R62, 70-200 RF lens, 1/200, ISO 400, F11)
Click image for full size.
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