Sadie says, "Mmmm..."

In the late afternoon I was standing just outside the back door of the house when Sadie walked up and paused at the door. I was thinking she would either: (1) join me outside, or (2) stand her ground at the threshold as I held the door open waiting for her to pass through. She chose (2).

So as she stood there I thought, "Hey...I like the way she looks while standing against the dark interior of the house. Maybe I can get a shot or two of this." I went inside to get my camera (Sadie twisted her head around to see what I was doing), grabbed a handful of dog kibble, then stepped back outside and got her attention by talking to her and handing her food.

I had a different picture in mind when I started this exercise, but Sadie would not open her eyes wide enough. Instead, I tried to get her actually doing something, instead of my usual staring-back-at-the-camera shot:

I played around with this in Lightroom; I tried different black-and-white treatments but none seemed quite right. I left the picture in color and just removed most of the color from her red tag bag, and added some sharpening around her eyes. Then i added a vignette to isolate her face further.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 50mm f/1.8 lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set to f/2.8; camera chose shutter speed of 1/800 second at ISO 400; center-weighted metered; -0.7 exposure compensation; auto white balance; normal JPG.)