Snow Day!

Gotta love snow days! Especially snow days that fall on vacation days!

Pretty girl!

Snow makes for springy leggies!

And bouncy doggies!

Even Fi had springs in her leggies!

And apparently snow enhances Abby's listening skills.  Here she is paying close attention to me while I'm calling her to come inside.  *ahem*  Apparently I need a refresher course in treat dispensing! 

Mom who? Who is this Mom person and why is she yelling my name?

Finally Editing Some Photos of the Girls

I've had a few minutes to go back and look at the month of photos I have of the girls (and hadn't edited/sorted), and found a "few" that I like.  As an aside, the girls were REALLY shaggy before their haircuts!

Fi needs a cape here.

Abby looks wildly more angelic here than she actually is; it's amazing what Photoshop can do!

Then there is this sequence....

Given her lack of amplitude and serious twisting, this next photo in the sequence should come as no surprise...

Front feet have landed, rear feet are still trying to untwist themselves.

 

 

Queen of the Frisbees

 

 

A Little Experimentation

Lately I've had this vision about photos I want to try with some of the shelter animals.  (My father would say that when I have visions, I should probably get out of the sun, but that's neither here nor there. I think...)

Anyway, to see if it would have a chance of working, I thought I'd take some of the photos I've been working on - some for clients, some for myself, and see if I could put them in different settings.  (The backgrounds mostly came from sites where people share photos and allow commercial licensing for free.  Why?  I don't know.  But since I have used a few of them, I felt it was only fair to share some snow backgrounds I took.  Actually, the idea is sort of cool, although as you'll see, sometimes it's a bit difficult to get the two photos to blend well - although I think that has more to do with my lack of experience than the quality of the photos).

Kenna the Japanese Chin was Princess of the Pillows in her living room, but I thought it would be sort of fun to try her in some different settings:

Maybe not 100% realistic, but a change from her on the couch!

I actually really like how this one came out - I could do a little more blending work, but I think I managed an acceptable level of matching 'haze'.

This amazing front door is actually where Kenna was visiting this weekend; she just didn't ever actually stand in front of the door. I was so impressed with the door (and the little fireplaces) that I knew this would be a killer background.

Part of my vision with the shelter dogs involves 'crowns' of fake flowers (with dogs, they tend to get worn more like bonnets rather than crowns, but there you go...), and Fi and Abby were my guinea pigs (or crash test dummies)....

I could have done a better job photoshopping Fi's head, but I was getting lazy.

Not really the best dog position for the angle of the background, but I like the general feel. (Some the light rays were in the original photo, some I added.)

Here I was actually going for a little 'overcooked', so I'm actually quite pleased with how it came out.

I go out to the shelter on Tuesday, so we'll see if I can make my vision actually work out!

Oh, YEAH!

Only a couple of photos from today's shoot, partially because I'm still culling them, but mostly because I don't want the client to get too many different sneak peeks - I like showing most everything at once.  However, there were just a few photos that are too good not to share.

This shoot, by the way, was initially supposed to be an old beagle with an old pickup truck.  It evolved into husband, wife, beagle, cat, and two chickens in sweaters, with the pickup truck as a 'background'.  The shoot was a little challenging because the truck was in a fairly small parking area, with sub-optimal fencing around it, so there will be some photoshop tweaking going on to get rid of the chainlink fences, but the shoot itself was AWESOME!  Seriously, 60 year old pickup truck, 13 year old beagle, a cat, and chickens in sweaters!!!  Yup, it was a great shoot!
 

I LOVE this photo.  It is exactly what I was hoping for.

This is one where the fence will have to be blurred a bit.

Yep, chickens in sweaters!

Yep, I'm happy!

We Got a Little Snow Today...

We got "a little" snow today (luckily all falling while I was at work, so my o'dark-thirty commute was nice and quiet).  Gary was stuck with the huge task of cleaning it all up, but he did a great job, even cutting a new track in the backyard so the girls could go out and enjoy the snow.

And enjoy it they did!

With all the snow we have, this was not an uncommon photo sequence:

1. The Leap!

2. The Capturing of the Frisbee!

3. The Face Plant! ("Could someone lend me a snorkel, please?!?)

There were also plenty of photos like this during the Frisbee retrieval portions of the afternoon :

Keep those in mind when looking at the following photos!

Happy, happy snow doggies!