The Hardest Photo I've Ever Taken

[Music] It's July 1st today, 2025. Today is Canada Day. But more importantly to me, uh, today is my dog's 15th birthday. So, I'm going to get the studio set up so that I can do a photo shoot uh with him. I have some things I want to do some nice portraits, something that I can print and put on my wall for when he's inevitably no longer here, which every day feels like it's getting closer and closer.

My dog's name is Winston. He can no longer climb up stairs on his own. He has to be carried up the stairs. And so I want to create some images that uh I can remember him by. Then we're going to go uh down to the beach, play in the water, have some fun at the park, and uh just enjoy our day together.

Okay, so uh I've got everything set up right now. I may need to adjust my lights, but we'll start here at the tether station. I have the EcoFlow River Max 2. I've got the ASUS ProArt P16. Two Amaran 150C lights here. Here I've got the Westcot Rapid Box Octa XL. I've got the 7T umbrella. The silver also Westcot. What I do need to do though is change my autofocus. I'm going to change that subject detect to animals.

But you can see right now that this is a little dim with I'm set at 1640th with an ISO of 4,000. Uh I'm not terribly concerned about the ISO, but I do want to uh freeze motion here and not get anything blurry cuz you know he's a dog. He moves around quite a bit. So I want to be at at least 1 500th of a second. This is a 24 to 105 F4. So I can't get any uh more open than f4 which is fine. I might even shoot at 56, but I'm going to have to turn uh the lights up and then I'm going to uh open up the ISO and then bump the exposure up in post as well.

That's the the setup I've got right now. Things may change. I'm going to put them either on a chair or uh maybe on one of these seat cushions here or I may just roll this out, tape it down, and get him on there as well. Now, my big concern is he is old and incontinent. There's a good possibility that he could pee on the floor here. So, I want to make sure that doesn't happen or if it does happen that at the very least I am set up to deal with that with some uh towels.

So, I'm going to get those when I go home as well. I'm dealing with the reality that this is likely going to be our last photo shoot. So, I'm going to do this portrait session and who knows, maybe next year I'll be doing the same thing. But, you know, he is 15 years old, so that's 105 in dog years. I'm trying to uh line the camera up. so that I get a uh sort of a a superhero view of Winston. The tripod I have cannot get to uh the floor like my old one used to be able to.

My old one was stolen. I loved it. It had a three-way articulating head. Now I've got a a ball head, which is fine, but not my favorite. So, I'm uh tethering into capture one and I've got live view uh set turned on. Okay, bud. Come here. Come here. Come on. [Music] Oh, I'm going to put you here. Can you do this for me? Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. Let's put this down. Okay. Okay. Okay.

All right. [Music] Go. Hello, sir. [Music] This is a good shot. Let's get zoom out a bit. [Music] Okay, I'm home now. I've imported the images and I'm going to go through and edit. I'm going to make my selections and I'm going to get this down to a single image. that I'm going to print and I'm going to frame and I'm going to hang on my wall. First thing I'm going to do though is uh because this is going to be black and white, I'm just going to select everything and turn black and white on for coloring just so I can as I'm going through here, I can quickly just see what it might potentially look like as a black and white image.

What I'm looking for right now going through these is Uh, I want laser sharp focus on the eyes. And even though these are at 1/400th of a second and I had eye tracking on for animals, there's so many missed shots here. Shots out of misfocus. And I don't know if that's uh my doing or the camera's doing or combination of both. Now, this is my bread and butter. This isn't the thing I do most of the time, but uh I know there are going to be some great shots in here.

I just have to get to them. [Music] Now, this shot here reminds me a lot of the photo that made me want to go adopt him in the first place. So, this is easily one of my favorites so far. [Music] I love that expression. Looks like he's smiling. He kind of looks like a muppet in this photo. [Music] I got my call down to 33. So, I think what I want from an image is an image where uh it looks like he's looking at the the viewer of the image.

Uh I don't want uh an image where he's kind of looking off because he does get this sort of glazed over confused look at times which is not really uh something that I want to immortalize in in an image. I want uh I want to have connection to the image. That being said, I do really like these shots here. So, I do have some here with connections, some without. Uh, the majority are not really connected to the viewer of the image.

I know he's looking at me when I was photographing these images. I like this. It's a different composition. You know, that's just the way I've cropped it. Obviously, the full crop composition is like that. But, uh, I like this idea here. Maybe bring him in a little bit more. That's something a little more artistic for the wall. I like this closeup. This feels a little more regal. This really reminds me of who he is.

And this one, he just looks old and tired. His his legs aren't even sort of in a seated position. They're just kind of like spled out in front of him. I like that a lot. I like this as well. That, that, and that are currently my three favorites. I'm very much leaning towards this shot right here. [Music] behind my [Music] Hallelujah. [Music]