Is this photo eerie? Here’s how I did it.

Heading into the dark side
Originally featured in colour in Ding-Dong! Trick or treat!

Original, unfiltered iPhone shot on the left, half-edited shot on the right. 

I took this shot on one of our morning loo break walks when the light on the ground just made it too interesting a shot to miss. The original was not ideal obviously. I had one hand on the phone and the other holding her leash and her little box of treats and we were walking along at the same time. Not the best scenario which resulted with the box of treats peeking into the picture in one corner.

Popped the picture into Snapseed where I decided this picture needs to be tipped to the right so that her shadow looms over her. I thought that was kind of cool… although the effect would be a lot better if she had scary, pointing up ears rather than silly, floppy ears. Oh well, I won’t fault you for inherited attributes, Donna. :P

Went to the Selective Adjust tool, which we talked about in more detail in this post, and planted little brightness (B) icons over the box, so that I could darken them to become part of the shadow.

I continued to tweak the brightness values in the various areas of the photo in Snapseed. And then riffled through the Grunge filters in Snapseed until I found something I liked for the eerie effect.

Used Whitagram to give the portrait image black borders to fit the square format for Instagram

Few things I feel is essential for this shot.

1) The dog needs to be able to walk on a loose leash so you can modulate your speed in order to ensure a fairly sharp picture. If I was struggling with a pulling dog, I would have likely ended up with a bunch of useless blurred images.

2) The bow is subtle but it adds a bit of theatrical drama to the picture for me. This also means that the dog needs to be comfortable wearing a bow on her head like that. When I first tried to get Donna to wear it at home, she stood locked in place with the bow and couldn’t move. Eventually she pawed it off. I knew I wanted to take a picture of Donna with the bow for Halloween so a week before that we started walking with the bow on her head every time we went out so that she starts to associate the bow to the fun of getting to go on a walk. Anyway, once outside she was too preoccupied with the sights and sounds to care about what was in her head.

The one other time I had a necklace on her head, I started with getting her comfortable having it on her waist first. Lots of treats there. And then I moved it to her head and continued with the treating. It is do-able in one morning ^ ^ at least with Donna :P

3) Other details which I would love to change will be having her on a black leather collar and leash so that it’s matchy-matchy with the bow :P and of course… the dog should have fierce, upright ears.  :P Haha!

The results is as you can see, while I do like the colour version, black and white is the more stark and eerie version, don’t you think?