Wordless Wednesday: The chair stealing edition

New toys are fun (aka accessorizing your DSLR gets expensive!)

Recently in a community I belong to someone was asking about purchasing a less expensive DSLR camera so she could take better pictures.  While typing up my response about my camera and how little it cost me, I came to a realization: The camera itself might not have cost me too much, but my purchases for it did not end there.  I bought my new camera in April of this year.  Here's the run-down of what it has cost so far:

Sony Alpha A230 with kit lens (18-55mm), refurbished by Sony: $285
Tamron 75-300mm lens: $125 (this was a gift from my wonderful partner)
Minolta 35-80mm lens, used: $30 (eBay)
Minolta 50mm f/1.7 lens, used: $100 (eBay)
Minolta 70-210mm lens, used: FREE (a lucky thing; the guy who sold me the 50mm screwed up and sent me the wrong lens; to make up for it he sent me this free!)
Puffer flash diffuser: $20
External bounce flash: $50
Flash diffuser for bounce flash: $10
Backpack to carry all this stuff in: $30
Extra battery: $20

Total: $670 (if I didn't get the one lens for free that would have been upped to around $800)

So what am I saying?  Even "cheap" DSLRs are not cheap.  The camera and all but one of the lenses were refurbished or used, which was the only way I could afford that many things for it.  All told, it's cost me a lot more money than I had contemplated spending, but it's all well worth it.

What else am I saying here?  I love my new bounce flash.  It was a really cheap one as I didn't want to spend $300+ more on a flash right now, but I think it's great!  Here are a few photos I've taken with it.


 


 


 

Wordless Wednesday

How I get my photos

One thing I've learned about canine photography is that it's messy.  I get wet and muddy and that's not always because the dogs are excited and jumping on me.  One of the major keys to getting a nice photo of a dog is getting down on their level.  For many people this probably means just squatting down a bit.  For me, it means, well, crawling around in the grass and dirt to get just the right angle.

Take this photo, for instance, of my friend's dog Nellie.




I absolutely adore this photo.  It's crisp, the colors are beautiful, and it really shows off Nellie's lovely face, eyes, and her awesome personality.

So what did I look like while this photo was being taken?  Well, Nellie's owner was nice enough to snap this photo.




So there ya go.  Me crawling around on the (rather wet) grass to get photos of dogs.  I think it was well worth it!

Not good enough

Recently I was reading a fantastic blog post by Nathan Winograd called Good Homes Need Not Apply.  If you haven't read it, you really should.

The basic gist is that there are many good homes for adoptable pets and that good homes come in all shapes and sizes.  But the problem comes in when rescues have rigid and often ridiculous requirements for adopting one of their pets.  All over the internet, when this problem gets brought up you get people posting about how they were refused by a rescue due to X really ridiculous reason.

Common rigid requirements are:

1. Must have a fenced in yard.  This excludes anyone who lives in an apartment, a housing association that will not allow fences, people with yards too big to be able to afford a fence, and people who just really do not want a fence in their yard.  Drive around any neighborhood in the USA and you will find very few yards with any sort of fencing.  All of those people who don't have one?  They can't even apply to adopt a dog.  Forget that they might take the dog out for several walks a day.  If there's no fence, don't even bother.

2. No children under X age.  X is often an arbitrary number like 6 or 7, but I've seen rescues who won't adopt out to people with children under 10.  Now look around you.  How many families do you know with children under 10?  Under 6 or 7?  While I can understand the reasoning that children get bitten more often than adults and that very young children don't always know how to interact with dogs properly, shouldn't you be considering the parents in all of this?  Meet the family, see how the parents interact with the children and how they work with the kids and the dog together?  We had dogs in my family from when my brother and I were pretty young (certainly younger than 6 or 7!) and my parents taught us how to interact with dogs.  I cannot imagine not having the joy of growing up with dogs around!

3. Cannot be away from the home for more than X hours.  X is often something like 4 hours.  This eliminates people (or even couples) who work normal 9 to 5 type jobs.  While some couples might have overlapping schedules that allow for someone to be home with the dog much of the time, many work pretty standard hours and are gone for the same part of the day.  Forget being single and wanting a dog if you have to work full time!  As has been pointed out, this limits rescues to adopting to people who either work from home or are millionaires.  Forget about parents who stay home with their kids.  See #2 above.  That won't work either.

Just today I was glancing through Petfinder at a couple puppies I found adorable and have a hard time believing aren't adopted yet.  I went over to check out the website for the rescue to see if I could figure out why.  One lists this: If you rent, we will not approve your application. If you live near a busy road or within city limits, a fenced in area is required.  In today's economy many people are choosing to rent and live for years in their rented place.  Many people do not want a house.  Recently I read an article that stated many people are opting to rent when they could buy.  Does that make those people less stable than those who buy a house they might someday have to foreclose on?  And I'm not sure how many cities these folks have been in, but in our fair city, there's often not enough yard to fence in.  People who live in the city walk their dogs (as we do).  The dogs are healthier, happier, and better socialized for it.

Rigid requirements are not doing anyone any favors.  The dogs that languish in foster homes for months, sometimes even years are not being helped.  They're in limbo and should never be in limbo for years on end.  The dogs dying in shelters because the rescues cannot pull them out because they're "full" are not being helped.  Because a rescue cannot find that perfect home (large home, large fenced in yard, someone home all day, couple is married, but has no young children and is also not "too old" to have a dog), they would rather allow shelters to kill other dogs that they could have saved if only they had looked at each person as an individual instead of as meeting or not meeting (much more likely in many cases) a certain set of rigid requirements.

I'm very thankful that Bare Bones Rescue (a sadly now defunct rescue) was willing to look at us as individuals.  After all, we're an unmarried couple living in a rented duplex with no yard and therefore no fenced-in-yard.  Other rescues would have turned their nose up at us.  But this one was happy to place a dog with us and, as anyone who has followed Dahlia's story knows, she is anything but unhappy.  She gets several walks a day, is fed good food, goes to the vet as scheduled and when anything comes up that we think merits a vet visit, gets plenty of attention from us, and goes to agility classes once or twice a week.

But hey, rescues who have rigid requirements, I guess we still just wouldn't be "good enough" for you.

Shaking off!

Inspired a bit by this post, when Dahlia was wet and shaking off this weekend I decided to try to get some photos of it.  Now, clearly, I don't have quite the camera Ms. Davidson does.  Nor do I have an awesome studio space to take wonderful photos in.

But despite that, I think the photos are hilarious enough to share.







I think this last one is my favourite.  Her head had basically finished the shaking, but the shake had continued down the rest of her body.  She looks like a big black sheep.

Wordless Wednesday

 

Eventually I will have more to say, I swear...

Wordless Wednesday

 

(Taken on my camera phone, hence the quality)

Wordless Wednesday: Balancing act

The bad news and the good news

I didn't mention in my post about the new lens that what I had actually ordered was a 50mm f/1.7 lens.  Somehow the person I bought it from sent me the wrong lens, a much more expensive lens.  Alas, it had to go onto its rightful owner and I was sent the proper 50mm f/1.7.

So there's the bad news.  The good news?  The new lens is almost as good and it's hard to tell the photos apart.

Wordless Wednesday: Kitty cuddling

On wonderful new lenses and all that...

Sorry folks, I'm on a bit of a photography kick right now.

Recently I ordered a new lens: a Minolta 50mm f/1.4.  I've been pretty pleased with my new camera, as anyone who reads this blog knows, but this new lens?  Wow!  I tossed it on the camera yesterday when I got home from work and took a few photos and what came out of my camera even blew me away.





 


Both of these were taken with the f-stop at 1.4 because hey, it's a new lens and I might as well try that aspect out.  They look so beautiful and naturally colored, so crisp and the bokeh is just amazing.  I'm in love with my new lens!

Even good photos can be edited

Here's another photo I took this past weekend.



 

Now, I love this photo.  I think it says a lot about the relationship between Dahlia and her Daddy (whose hand you see in the photo).  The earnest look on her face, the angle of her body and leg leading to joining with her Daddy's hand.  I just really like this photo.

But in looking at it, I wondered what it would look like in sepia tone and with a softer focus.  Would it take some of the eye away from the contrast of black fur against green grass?  Would it give more of a focus on the joining of canine paw and human hand?  So I took to the editing programs to see what I could do.  I altered the photo to be in a fairly low-key sepia, softened the focus, and added a bit of vignetting.  I also photoshopped out that annoying little piece of grass hanging off her foot and the tags hanging from her collar.

This is what I ended up with.




And again, I like it quite a bit.  So moral of the story: Play with your photos and see if you can make something else of them!

How to make a bad photo better (aka not every photo comes out good!)

On Sunday I took a large group of photos.  Some came out great.  Some came out horrible.  And then there were ones you looked at and thought Wow that would have been a great photo if only...

This was one of them.

It's easy to see what is wrong with this photo, but let me give you a short rundown:

1. It's washed out.
2. The colors are all wrong (too blue).
3. The highlights are blown out.

How did this happen?  It was a cloudy day and I was not quite aware of which direction the sun was coming from when I squatted down to get this photo.  As soon as I took it, I realized the mistake and moved to keep the light behind me.  But I didn't get another shot quite like this.

In attempts to edit it, I ultimately ended up with this as a photo.

This is somewhat better.  She's not quite as faded.  The colors are somewhat better though her face is still blue and washed out funny.  The background is still blown out a bit.  And after editing it, another flaw was brought to light: there's something hanging out in the top lefthand corner of the photo.  What was it?  A treat bag that had floated into the photo.

At this point, I was ready to give up, but I had one more thing to try.  I got into Adobe Lightroom and turned the photo B&W, which immediately improved it.  I lowered the exposure quite a bit (-1.24), increased the blacks (17), and also increased the contrast (+9).  Then I edited out the baggy by using the cloning tool in Adobe Photoshop.  And voila!  This photo.






I'm really quite pleased with it.

So basically, what I'm trying to say is: Don't give up on a photo just because it didn't come out good right from the camera!

I have a problem

See...once long ago when I first got Dahlia, I thought it would be funny to dress her up as a prisoner for Halloween. Alas, the costume was too big and the hat? Well, she looked like THIS.



Basically, she looked horrified. And yet OH SO CUTE with those big eyes. I swore up and down that I wouldn't put anything else on her because she looked so UNDIGNIFIED and clearly thought I was a big fat meanie for doing it.

But then there was this.



Which was a photo that was 100% accidental. There was no intention to put anything on her, but then suddenly the hat was tossed on her and she looked so HAPPY that I snapped a photo. She became Ferocious D and I swore I would find a way to photoshop gold chains onto her. Alas, my photoshop skillz are still somewhat lacking, though a friends are not.

There was also this...graduation from obedience class at Petsmart! How dignified does she look here?




Ok so she might look somewhat horrified there too.

And here...also horrified.




Imma cut you bitch.

So I decided all I was going to do was collars. And a ridiculously silly rubberband thing that a groomer put in her hair.




She was obviously very proud of that look, even if she did look like she had some sort of Christmas mohawk.

Pity da fool!


But then St. Patrick's Day rolled around and I couldn't resist. This time I got hot dogs out and VOILA! Dog with ears up!




Such a dignified old man, she is.


Still, she had her moments of absolute resignation.




I will kill you in your sleep...do not doubt it...ever...




Mom, frisbees are NOT hats.


And then I went whole hog for Christmas! LOOK AT THAT DOGGEH!!




And one cannot forget the reindeer antlers.




I CHASE deer Mom. I am not ONE of them.


I was at Petsmart one day and I could not resist...DOGGLES. Those had to go on her too!



I dare to be stupid...

And then there was Pirate Dahlia...




ARRRRRGH!!!!


So what I'm trying to say is I bought a baseball cap for Dahlia to wear to the Chiefs game next week. Yeah...I have a problem.