Black Dog Pictures
Wendy Milner
Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
red eye.
--
Wendy
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Wendy Milner HPDesk: wendy_milner@hp4000
Hewlett-Packard HP-UX: we...@fc.hp.com
Mail Stop 102 Telnet: 229-2182
3404 E. Harmony Rd. AT&T: (303) 229-2182
Fort Collins, CO, 80525 FAX: 229-3526
Matthias Weber
|> How do you get a good picture of a black dog (Newfoundland).
|> Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
|> While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
|> my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
|> red eye.
|>
|>
This is a very old question - much older than photography. The problem
is that dark objects tend to pop into the background on a flat picture.
The human eye/brain tries to see depth in a picture by several means,
the best known is perspective, but size colour is also important.
Painters have demonstrated centuries ago that it is possible to have
dark objects in the foreground, but their tricks are not easy to
copy. My first suggestion would be: look at such paintings and try
to arrange a similiar situation. Be carefull with the background colours -
nothing too bright which would capture the viewers eyes. Some small toy
in front of your dog might be helpfull, too. Try to create perspective
by alligning objects behind the dog.
Good luck.
Matthias
Paul Nuber
: How do you get a good picture of a black dog (Newfoundland).
: Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
: While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
: my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
: red eye.
The light source needs to be positioned so that the dog's fur shines.
Take your dog outside at noon and take a picture of it. The dog will
be a block blob with a white stripe on top. There will be some detail in the
highlight to shadow transition area.
Try again at sunrise or sunset. Have the dog face the sun. You take a
picture from this position.
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-*- dog
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camera
This should give good detail in the face, but the rear of the dog will
still be black.
The best solution is probably a complicated studio lighting setup.
--
Paul Nuber
p...@fc.hp.com
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Fort Collins, CO
Chuck Tribolet
>How do you get a good picture of a black dog (Newfoundland).
>Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
>While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
>my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
>red eye.
>
>--
>Wendy
>
> Hewlett-Packard HP-UX: we...@fc.hp.com
> Mail Stop 102 Telnet: 229-2182
> 3404 E. Harmony Rd. AT&T: (303) 229-2182
> Fort Collins, CO, 80525 FAX: 229-3526
Hi fellow Newfy owner from Fairsea's Beaucoup de Chien (pidgin French
for a "whole lotta dog", which at 7 months and 93 pounds, he IS). Beau
is our third Newf and we've spent a LOT of time trying to get good
Newfy pix, and have succeeded on occasion. Some tricks:
- Outdoors, use fill flash.
- Indoors, one flash on camera, one reflected from an umbrella off to
the side.
- Shoot color negative film, and overexpose a stop or two so you pick
up the detail in the black. Then print it yourself, or have a good
custom lab do the prints.
- Good lens quality and careful focus is critical to picking up the
detail in the fur. Focus on the eyes.
- Keep trying. Shoot a minimum of a roll each time.
(Or get a Landseer (for the un-Newfy, thats a fairly uncommon Newf that's
white with big black spots - the dog on the Big Dogs shirts is a Landseer
(sorry St. Bernard folks, check the head shape, its a NEWF, not a SAINT))
Chuck Tribolet
Tri...@Almaden.IBM.Com
San Jose, CA
If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch.
Norman Diamond
>In article <3144dq$f...@tadpole.fc.hp.com>, we...@cnd.hp.com (Wendy Milner) writes:
>|> While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
>|> my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one red eye.
>My first suggestion would be: look at such paintings and try
>to arrange a similiar situation. Be carefull with the background colours -
>nothing too bright which would capture the viewers eyes. Some small toy
>in front of your dog might be helpfull, too. Try to create perspective
>by alligning objects behind the dog.
If you can recognize the tricks used by those painters, yes. The other
ideas don't seem to be too helpful in making details of the dog visible.
My best idea is to avoid flash, and use a sufficiently fast lens and
film so that the dog can be photographed using available light. And
the light should be from the side(s) at some angle(s) that help make
the details visible. If the black is not entirely uniformly black,
then reflections and shadows at various angles will make the details
stand out. A flash will flatten them all.
--
<< If this were the company's opinion, I would not be allowed to post it. >>
segmentation fault (california dumped)
Dean R Money
>Wendy Milner (we...@cnd.hp.com) wrote:
>: How do you get a good picture of a black dog (Newfoundland).
>: Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
>: While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
>: my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
>: red eye.
>
or a different dog. ;)
Marlon Cole
That probably would be the best, however I have a potentially cheaper solution :-)
I have a black cat (and a white one, which makes photographing the 2 together
interesting :-)
I've given up totally on flash, as the cat just comes out shiney and over-exposed.
The solution that works for me is to use a hand-held light meter and take an
incident light reading, which gets around all the tricky exposure recalculations
you'd need to do using a reflected light reading such as you'd get from your
cameras meter. I then simply set the camera on manual exposure to the values
given by the meter, with no adjustment necessary, grin wildly as the camera
desperately tries to convince me I haven't a clue what I'm doing, and snap away.
This does of course mean you're limited to outdoor photography (sorry, I didn't
see the original article, so I don't know if that's an issue or not), but you
definitely won't get red-eye. But on a nice sunny day you can simply snap away
- very important when you're trying to stalk your active little kitty around the
garden :-)
Oh, and I use the cheapest light meter I could find (c. 25 UKPounds).......
Hope this helps,
Marlon
---
Marlon Cole email: Marlo...@nottingham.ac.uk
Systems Programmer Tel: 0602 513398
Cripps Computing Centre
University of Nottingham, ENGLAND.
Marc Clarke
: How do you get a good picture of a black dog (Newfoundland).
: Or for that matter, black cat or black horse?
: While I've lucked out with the light on occasion, mostly
: my dog looks like a black spot with pink tongue and one
: red eye.
For black animals and birds the standard "sunny F/16" rule becomes the "dark
animal sunny F/11" rule.