Dogs Dogs Dogs. Earlier today a friend asked me for some ideas on how to photograph her Dog. I did point her to our How to Photograph Pets tutorial but also thought it might be useful to pull together a few Dog Photographs to give her a little extra inspiration. Here’s some of what I came across.

Image by Brian Hathcock

PS: I have a feeling that the cats are going to want a right of reply on this post.

Image by joshuahoffmanphoto

Flickr changed my life. True story.

I am a relatively new Flickr convert and a full fledged Flickr evangelist and my number one message to the masses: Flickr isn’t a dumping ground for ‘pics’. It isn’t a graveyard where millions of images are laid to rest never to be seen again. It is a community where photographers share their latest conquests and view beautiful works by other artists. Of course, there are probably millions of users who merely dump and run but I think Flickr has done something rather clever to prevent too many non-users: they charge a minor yearly fee for accounts who want to upload more than a certain number of images. This might turn off a huge percentage of users who just want a free method of generating a url for their photos to put on Ebay but I think it just weeds out those who don’t intend on doing much with their subscription in the first place.

So how can I make the statement that Flickr changed my life? First I’ll lay a foundation for where I’m coming from. I firmly believe that the number one way any visual artist can become better at what they do is to view other works of art. It opens you to the possibilities, techniques, ideas and concepts you may have never entertained before. Allow me to demonstrate. Before I became engrossed in Flickr, I’d never before seen:

I’m good at messing up stuff.  I’ll admit it.  Take for instance the photo above.  It is the final shot I took of many while in the Kazumura Cave on the Big Island of Hawaii.  And it still needs help.  In a recent post here on DPS entitled 14 Tips For Cave Photography, I explained some of the things I learned from a first time attempt at underground photography.  In this post I’d like to humbly share my mistakes while researching the topic in hopes that it’ll speed up your learning process.  My basic idea was to use the flash off camera and fire it multiple times using the pilot button.  In this sense I hoped to gain a more even lighting.  Let’s take a look at some of the shots that lead up to the final shot. (All photos are 30 second exposures)

A few months back we published a collection of Forced Perspective images which was very popular with readers.

Forced perspective is defined as ‘a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear farther, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is.’ (Wikipedia)

This is far from a recently popular thing for photographers to do. Here’s a great example from 1918 which was submitted by one of our readers – Graham Parkhurst – that illustrates it from 90+ years ago.

The picture is of 18,000 men preparing for war in a training camp at Camp Dodge, in Iowa.

A few facts about the image:

• Length from base to Shoulder: 150 feet
• Right Arm: 340 feet
• Length of Torch and flame: 1000 feet
• Total Length: 1490 Feet
• Number of men in body and head of figure: 2,000
• Number of men in right arm:

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Weekly Assignment

Ghosts, goblins and things that go bump in the night were a common theme in our Scary or Spooky assignment. There were definitely some scary and spooky entries this week but we had a very clear winner with this week’s votes. The winner this week was Murtasma’s Skeletor shot. This elaborate costume was both scary and well done. Our first runner up was a_brewley’s “Thing under the bed”. She took this shot while her daughter was asleep! Thank goodness she didn’t wake up. One thing we learned from this shot was that lots of us mods were scared of finding things under the bed as kids. It was gritty and scary and all kinds of film noir and probably a few of us found …