Levi

I was hanging around my studio today, working on the boring stuff – scanning and indexing old film, working on my marketing, doing some work on our magazine. Got kinda bored and I wanted to take a picture of SOMETHING.

Most days I bring my dog Levi into the office. Well, technically he is my son Adam’s dog, but I kind of inherited him since my son left for college and then when he got married, didn’t have room for him at his new home. He is both our dog and loyal to either one of us.

Levi is an awesome duck hunting dog. He will break the ice and swim a half mile to go retrieve a downed duck. He loves to hunt but since Adam left I haven’t had a hunting partner so I don’t go nearly as often as in the past. Duck hunting is a lot of work, especially solo.

I had a black background set up from some work in the studio earlier this week, and the lights are up most of the time, so I just moved the lights a bit lower, tweaked my settings with Paul C Buff’s awesome Cyber Commander, set my camera on a tripod and called Levi. He is pretty obedient and I just had to get him positioned just right, bribe him with a treat and he sat there just fine while I snapped off a few photos. Shooting black on black is always a challenge.

I gridded my lights to control the spill on the background and use v-flats to keep the glare from the rim lights off my camera lens. I wanted mostly spot lights to create strong highlights and the gridded softbox was for fill and texture. The back lights gave Levi separation from the background.

All together it took about 10 minutes to shoot and kept me from being bored.