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Gallynette — Special pose for the photographer!
Published: 2013-03-12 15:15:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 1405; Favourites: 92; Downloads: 0
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That is a great shot !!!
I feel kind of jealous.
The first thing that strikes me is the crisp sharpness of this frozen motion, which gives a very clear sense of total mess. I see an anarchic explosion of movement and vibrant colors !
That's in part due to the fact that almost no leg is touching the ground. This pic could be titled "Everybody's jumpin' !"...
And then I the second thing I notice of course, is that crazy dog in the center. That's excellent ! I could also call that picture just "Crazy Dog"...
He seems to have his legs entangled in those noodling lines (even though it's not the case), which increases the sense of crazy-messy jump even further. Add in these snowflakes flying around (in perfectly frozen motion too) and you've got this explosion of joy and life perfectly depicted !
Never mind that the main subject is not in focus (i mean, the front dog is in focus, not the crazy one that's looking at us, which is obviously the main subject once you start looking for one). You don't see that, unless you pay close attention to the pic.
It is still on the edge of acceptable sharpness because of the long depth-of-field. That DOF does as much to crisp-freeze that explosion of total collective madness as does the fast exposure. I believe any kind of blur (lens or motion) would have weakened the impact. And I know the crispness of the contours is what attracted me to this pic in the first place.
Sure, it could have been better if the center dog was in focus. Perhaps I would then noticed him first. And it could have been better with an even longer DOF, which you could have achieve by closing down your lens a little bit more. It seems, from the data I can see, that you had some (though not much) margin left for that. (Not that I've ever done better in such a pinch but, i'm just sayin'.)
Did you digitally sharpen the image afterwards to compensate for this lack of subject sharpness, or did you just leave your camera's automatic sharpening on ? Either way, I find the resulting effect a tad too gross: look at the contours of black dogs against the white snow (for example, look at the crazy dog's ears) and you'll see a thin white halo, typical of excessive sharpening. Sharpening is a delicate tool which takes time and painstaking attention to master. Perhaps localized sharpening could have helped too, as long as it remained subtle. In my humble experience, you can never correct a focus issue entirely with digital sharpening. You can just make it
While we're on the topic of digital treatment, perhaps you could increase the contrast a tiny bit... Here, I insist on "tiny", because it's pretty well contrasted as it is, and overdoing could ruin it.
Back to sharpness and Depth Of Field (the most interesting issue to me here) : The somehow messy (and not very interesting) trees in the background could get distracting if brought too much in focus by a longer DOF. Their presence renders the exact perfect DOF difficult to balance (without them, it would be simple: the longer the better), so perhaps your choice of F/10 is the right compromise after all. Given the circumstances.
I believe the picture would have been better without the trees and with a longer DOF (or at least with the center dog in focus), but being as it is, you probably did the best possible job at presentation... I'm talking about your watermark here : These background trees would unbalance the composition in a wrong way, if it weren't for your rightly shaped, rightly sized, rightly dense and rightly positioned watermark. It subtly evens the composition, and I need to mention this because I usually find watermarks ugly and degrading. This one, on the contrary, helps the final picture.
Now that we're on the topic of composition, there is still a bright side to those trees : see, the dogs trace a bent diagonal, from upper right to lower left corner, which works well enough -- it's not perfect, but that's good because such a crazy picture can't be too perfect. Then, the trees' hardest shadows, combined with the dogs' hard shadows too, trace some kind of a cone, expanding from right to left, hence giving a hint of direction to that mad, oh-so-joyous explosion !
That's the composition I see.
Hope this helps.
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Oh wow, thanks a lot for that long critique!
This was my first time at such an event and actually the first time I was taking photos of something super fast (I seem to have a lot of 'first times' lol). All day I tried several combinations to get nice photos. There was the speed problem, the snow problem (too much sun on too much snow, too much snow on the camera after a dog group), there was the 'no second chance' problem, there was the 'we are the official photographers, don't get in the way' problem... I learned so much in a few hours lol
This photo is only pure fun because it's definitely not what I expected to get, but it had something that suddenly made me laugh so much that I was 'oh well, not perfect, but damn funny!' And it does work on people, no matter it's definitely not perfect hihi
However I do take in consideration everything that you say. I don't really remember how I edited this photo, I was still trying to learn the basics of editing last year (I used to hate it 
Thank you so much again!
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Thanks for the story. It makes me think, maybe I should get out of my comfort zone more.
If you're referring to a certain well-known photo editing software's "Bicubic Sharper" resampling mode, I personally pinch my nose and stay away from it. Same for "Bicubic smoother". They are just too heavy.
I even find the regular "Bicubic" algo a bit too soft too. I prefer the "Bilinear" algo, which I've set as default in the Preferences. It renders the sharpest resizes, to my opinion. Only problem is it sometimes sneaks in a bit of aliasing or moiré on sharp geometric subjects. In those cases, then, I go for "Bicubic" instead.
But "Bicubic Sharper" and "Bicubic Softer" are only the lazy photographer's friend (don't take me wrong: I know some very professional photo editors who live by them though - I'm just arrogant enough to think they are all wrong). There are several specific sharpening and softening tools in Ph--that software, and they all let you control the effect finely, either after of before resizing or both. That's a lot more work, I know. That's why I'm most of the time happy with the "Bilinear" setting.
(PS: "Bicubic Automatic" does not automatically adjust in intensity. It only switches between sharper and smoother depending of whether you're up- or downsampling your image. Just as worthless, if you want my opinion.)
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It's thanks to my photo club that I learn to leave my comfort zone. Although they still have to convince me with portrait
Oh I never used any other softwares than Lightroom and Photoshop actually! I spent the last year trying to understand how to use Photoshop properly and I discovered many interesting options with time (and still do). I think like many, when I started editing my photos, I was 'exaggerating' things sometimes; Now I'm a bit more on the safe side hopefully
You still made me curious about those Bicubic softwares, I never heard about it!
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Thank you so much for your support
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Here's a funny face pic of my dogs. :thumb359099006:
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ignore the enormous fail. here's the link: Click me
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lol the dog in the middle 
this is an epicly awesome pic
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That's the most priceless face I ever got
Thank you so much
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*bursts out in laughter* sled dogs make the weirdest faces XD
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Keep having the quote "this is my LOL-face" in mind.
I love it! Well shot!
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Thanks a lot
That could be a good title lol
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great shot! do you happen to know what breed they are?
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Thanks a lot
I'm really not good with dog breeds unfortunately so I can't really tell
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oh I see. well I would have said Eurohound but their fur seems somewhat longer and it`s shot in Canada...so i`ll put them under Alaskan Husky ^^
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Oh, because it was an international competition, the dogs and their masters came from the whole world so I wouldn't be surprised! But as I told you, I don't know much about it, it was the first time I attended such an event
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oh, ok, I see...hmm...i`ll just have to take a lucky guess then + do more research then. Thank you for accepting to submit it in the !
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Thank you
I totally love his face
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