Belle at Solvang

I was lucky enough to have several sessions to do during the Solvang Greyhound Fest at the end of February. One of those sessions was with a veteran of several Solvang events, Belle. If I remember correctly, she's 13(!).

She is a beautiful fawn. She was very patient with me as I tried to get different perspectives of her. I ended up pretty much repeating the same kind of head shot. The problem with using the garden at the hotel we stayed was that you didn't want to see the second story of the hotel building that surrounds the garden on two sides, or the wooden fence that encloses it. So you ended up standing and pointing the camera down at your subject. Belle was not interested in lying down so that I could get a different kind of photo. But that's okay -- I want my subject to be comfortable more than anything else while I photograph.

One picture of Belle in particular reminded me very much of a photo I took of our second greyhound, Nikki. In both pictures the girls are bright-eyed, and have big smiles. This is Belle's picture:

 

I ended up cropping the original frame after I had removed a number of spots, played with the tone curves a bit, and added a vignette.

She is a sweetheart; I'm glad I finally got to do a session after all these years.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 50mm f//1.8 lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set at f/2.8; camera chose shutter speed of 1/2500 second at ISO 400; center-weighted metered; auto white balance; shot in RAW.)