An old favorite

This is one of my favorite pictures of Atlas, which I actually took about a year and a half ago. It's been hanging around in my "pictures I really like" folder for a while, and now that I've got Photoshop Elements I went back in and worked it up a bit. It fell together pretty well and, in my opinion, was just about the amount of work I like to put into a picture in photoshop. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't do it in a darkroom, the fact that you're doing it in Photoshop means you messed something up in the first place. (Unless you're being super crazy and combining eight pictures into something completely different. While extremely impressive, that isn't photography.)

Anyway, the long and short of the shot was that he used to flip himself upside down and play with the ball over the edge of the toy. I caught him at it one day and was fast enough with the camera to get a decent looking shot (no paw over his face, no motion blur, etc.) What really makes this picture work is that I got as close to his level as possible, with the camera practically resting on the floor in front of him.

If you ask anyone that's tried to take pictures of a black animal, they'll tell you that it is EXTREMELY hard to get something that looks like more than a featureless silhouette. (One photographer was quoted as saying that the only way to get a decent picture of your black dog was to get a grey dog.) This shot was taken so long ago that I can't for the life of me remember what the lighting was like, but I do know there was a bank of windows to the left of the frame, and the overhead light to the right was probably on. Long and short, I got lucky, and even then his front legs tend to lose detail.

Compare that to the 'unaltered' shot, which I only desaturated ('made black-and-white,' for you lay folk).