What is my cinematic edit? It's kind of shifting the colors a bit so they aren't natural but interesting. Call it color grading, as film editors do, or as I now call my cinematic edit. I became interested in color grading as I really started noticing it in both film and photography. I mean, bop me over the head but it's been around forever. Look at movies. The colors aren't a realistic portrayal of a scene, they are an interpretive or emotional portrayal. They make you feel something, they signal something.

Any sci-fi futuristic kind of movie is somewhere going to have a blue steely tone. It's cold. It's space. Any desert scene is going to be brown and dusty and will give you the feeling of something dry and brittle and harsh. Unfriendly. A popular look has been cyan and orange tones. It's warm in the highlights and cold in the shadows but it's emphasized more than you would see in real life.

Look at the top photographers, maybe like Dan Winters. He often has a green, desaturated tone to his images. And he's frickin' amazing. Or Annie Leibovitz. You start seeing the tones.

Is it like Instagram filters? Yeah, kinda. But I think it's a bit more sophisticated. It's a bit more deliberate than pushing a button. A lot of times color grading is meant to convey different emotions that colors evoke. And that's part of set design as well. That goes way back to the masters of painting that had limited palettes. You might see a painting that only has black, beige, red, cream and maybe a smattering of a surprising color for emphasis. Then again, you might see something in all the glorious colors.

Anyway, this whole color theory is what I'm working on now. It's something I want to offer that's different than other pet photography. Sometimes I work on an image and I think, are they gonna assume I made a mistake in the colors or do they see I'm going for something different? I don't know. But this whole thing is now very fascinating to me and I hope you see it in some of the work I'm producing now.

In my composite work, the totally unrealistic compositions that have several visual elements that weren't photographed together in situations that would never happen, I've always added a layer of color to make it look more cohesive, to bring it together. You add things that weren't photographed in the same conditions and they're going to look different and stand out and not in a good way.

You may not like the cinematic edit and want a more natural look. I get that. Your dog is not blue. But he could be. It's just one more thing I can offer you.

Here are some examples: