Fun in the water

Tuesday’s visit to the War Memorial Gardens saw Dublin Camera Club members wandering around the gardens, cameras ready, looking for things to photograph.  So when a dog jumped into a fountain and started playing catch with his owner, both of them were quickly surrounded by a gaggle of photographers.

It turns out the dogs name is Floyd, and he is a blue roan cocker spaniel, who certainly seemed to enjoy his game of catch, while remaining unperturbed by the attention of the paparazzi.  As a subject he provided me and my fellow photographers with an interesting challenge as he was constantly on the move – and quite quickly at that.

I had just been photographing some roses using some off camera lighting before I stumbled upon this scene, so I had to react quickly to get a shot of Floyd – my white balance was set for tungsten (as I had been using gelled flash for the roses shots), my shutter speed was set to 1/200s (the maximum speed you can use with flash) and the aperture was set in accordance with the flash power.  These settings were good for the still life scene I had been photographing.  Not so good for an action shot of a dog at the upper limits of the reach of my flash.

But with not a lot of time to adjust a whole host of settings, I decided to hope that my SB-800, off camera in my left hand, would throw just enough light on the dog to help me freeze a little of the action so I quickly increased its power, zoomed the beam to 105mm, and, to get enough light to fall on my sensor (both from the flash and the ambient light), opened up my shutter speed.  First shot was too dark across the frame, though the flash looked like it might work.  Opening up the aperture another stop and the second shot, that you see above, showed potential.

The white balance was off, due to my flash being gelled tungsten but much of the ambient light being from the overcast evening sky. I was shooting in RAW though, meaning that I would be able to adjust the white balance to taste later in post processing.  Back at the computer I actually settled on a monochrome treatment for the shot, as it isolates the drops of water nicely from the background and makes for a lovely representation of Floyd’s coat.  I hope his owner, Natasha, will be happy with the end result.