Seen some hard times

We ran across this guy at Taos Pueblo in New Mexico — apparently nobody actually keeps dogs as family pets, so a half dozen or so dogs just wander around as strays / community pets. Judging by his left eye, this one got in a scuffle recently.

Seen some hard times...

It took me some tinkering in Aperture before I got happy with this shot — it just looks better to me as a pseudo-antique than as a full color image.

Poised

A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:

Poised

I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:

1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).

2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.

3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.

So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).