I'm especially amused and tickled when Katie is asked a question and she responds by tilting her head. She doesn't do it often, and Sadie does it even less. I'm surprised she didn't walk up to me and stick her nose in my eye after I had her stay near a backyard planter. I usually kneel to a dog's eye level or lower to get a better perspective. The problem with doing that, at least in Katie's case, is that she usually walks up to me when I do so. But this time she stayed put, so I quickly took two shots.
Because I focus on the eye, I often set my Nikon's AF area mode to Dynamic-Area AF (the icon looks like a rectangular surrounded by crosshairs), and then place a focus point over the eye. So if my subject moves, the focus point will track the subject. (I also use the Auto-Area AF mode (its icon looks like a big white rectangle) and let it figure out what the subject is, especially if I'm walking alongside my subject and have to hold my Nikon low to the ground to get a different angle.) In this instance, I used Dynamic-Area AF.
Some minor tweaking was done to both images using Lightroom: cropping, adding some brush strokes to the eyes and increase their exposure to +0.7, increasing the Clarity parameter to 35, and using the Sharpening preset.
(Shot using the D300 with the 50mm lens set at f/2; aperture-priority; center-weight metered; 1/400 sec at ISO 200; cloudy white balance; normal JPG.)
