I know it sounds like you're about to enter a Southern Gothic novel with a blog title of "Revisiting the Past," but what today's post is about is ruminating on an image, thinking about ways to improve it, and improving it. At least that's what I hope I did. 

I photographed three Vizslas, actually three times I photographed them, and the sunset shoot was certainly my most spectacular. My favorite is of just one of them -- a silhouette of Csilla, who looks like she is chasing a sailboat. Well, I'm not completely sure it's my favorite, I just like it a lot. A couple of things always bugged me about it. The sailboat is pretty small and the sky is really washed out. I wanted to show this image on one of my groups for pet photography professionals in our monthly contest. This one was using negative space, which essentially means the subject might look small in the overall image but it is balanced by its place in the environment. 

But as I looked at it, I didn't like it for the reasons outlined above. I looked at other images around it but the dog wasn't right. The sailboat was good -- even better than the original -- and the sky was good but the dog? No good. 

Now I'm not a photography purist. I like Photoshop and I'm not afraid to use it in ways that I think, to my eye, improve it. As I pondered what to do, I realized I could take the sky and boat from one image and combine it with the dog in the other image. The only problem with that was there wasn't enough sky to the right of the image when I placed the sailboat in the same place as the original photo. But what do you know, with content aware fill I was able to create the sky (with a few wispy clouds) all the way to the right side. And voila, there you have it, bingo-bango, done. 

Oh, now here's something funny. I always thought what was so interesting about this image was that Csiila looks like she is totally aware of the sailboat and is chasing it. But when I looked closer at it in Lightroom, come to find out she is actually looking at the camera! I'm not sure whether knowing about that or not takes away from the image. 

Wish me luck in the contest!

If you want your pet photographed, I want to be your pet photographer. I'm Diana Lundin, I'm in Los Angeles, and I stand ready to serve you. Give me a call at 818.481.521 and let's plan your session!