EMPS: Footprints of a Gigantic Hound (or Not)

When Carly called for photos of footprints for her Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #31: Footprints, I thought about past attempts to photograph such things, along a path next to the airplane Boneyard a few years ago and, unsurprisingly, at the dog park. These photos proved rather challenging to take and edit, because there is very little contrast or color variation to work with. I will add photos from these previous attempts to this entry if I can find them, but last night while my internet connection was down for hours I failed to turn them up. So let's start with Monday's new ones, taken - where else? - at the dog park.

From EMPS

The dirt track at Miko's Corner is fairly sandy, so when the ground is dry the footprints of dogs and humans are fairly indistinct. But if you look carefully at the shot above you can make out at least a few pawprints.

For this one I deliberately stood in the water splashed by dogs drinking (I think the fountain leaks a little as well). The resulting footprints from walking away soon dried into invisibility.

This is an FX shot using negative, saturation and solarization. I wanted something more extreme, but brown and grey images don't lend themselves to wild effects in photo editing programs.

This rather atypical shot of Pepper is from April 2008. I may have posted it before, but this version is newly reedited to emphasize the pawprints. I suspect Pepper's extreme unfluffiness here was due to her being wet and muddy.

More later, maybe!

An update to yesterday's entry: I'm giving GMail a spin. The address at gmail.com is Mavarin2. Feel free to help me try it out!

Karen