I had an opportunity to photograph dogs today. I have never been very good with moving subjects, which is why I normally shoot flowers and landscapes. They don’t run. But I won’t shy away from a chance to try my hand at animal photography so there I was, equipped with two 1 GB memory cards and the lovely 300mm f4L, ready for action.

There are several things that amaze me about this photo. First and foremost, that it worked out at all! Most of the pictures I took had either compositional or focus problems, or both. But somehow, heaven knows how, I managed to get everything right. The only manipulation is with the very top of the image, where I cloned off some OOF forest. I could also have cropped it off, or left it there – it didn’t disturb that much, but I just liked the idea of a homogenous grey BG to the beautiful sunlit dog. Another amazing thing is that this was the 3rd image I took in the whole photo session, must have been beginner’s luck then. But that also made the difference – the snow is unspoilt here. The more the dogs were playing, the more there were tracks in the snow and it naturally shows in the images.

This is a good example of my editing routine. When I start at the virtual light table, I first check out the sharpness of the image. Anything unsharp gets binned straight away, in this case it was about 75% of the 208 images I took. Then I check the exposure and bin the over or underexposed images, and having done that, concentrate on the composition. In this case, I also had an issue with the dog postures and what they were doing in the image, and many images with more butt than face were condemded to the trash can, along with everything with missing limbs (the tail seems to be a tough one to include in the frame). I also had some duplicates or almost similar images which I threw away. After a couple of hours at the light table, I had 9 keepers. 9 out of 208 – thank you digital! When I shoot landscapes, my keeper ratio is about 1:3 and with closeups, 1:5 or so. This depends a whole lot of on the circumstances (for example, the keeper ratio plummets when I take closeups under windy conditions) but one thing for sure is that it was a whole lot higher when I was shooting film. Just goes to show that the shooting habits differ depending on the media. With digital you can be wasteful so you don’t always think through how you shoot, instead you take a few alternative versions and keep the one you like best. But to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t even have attempted photographing the dogs if I still used film. Quantity doesn’t equal quality, but quantity can guarantee quality… Sometimes, photography becomes a numbers game!