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Urban Challenge

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we’re stepping out of the woods and into the city with our theme: “Urban.” Whether you live in a bustling metropolis or a quiet town, urban environments offer a wealth of opportunities for creative pet photography. From striking architecture to vibrant street scenes, there’s so much to explore!

Urban settings can provide unique backdrops and textures that you won’t find in nature. It’s time to look at your surroundings with fresh eyes and see how your furry friends can interact with the city’s pulse.

For Beginners: Embracing the Cityscape

If you’re just starting out, focus on incorporating basic urban elements into your photos. This could be anything from brick walls to street art or even simple sidewalks. Use these elements to frame your subject and practice finding interesting compositions.

Ideas:

  • Capture your pet against a colorful mural or a textured wall, or even a colourful bench, to create contrast and interest.
  • Look for quiet alleys or small squares where you can safely position your pet and focus on the urban backdrop.
  • Experiment with symmetry by positioning your pet in the center of a scene with balanced elements on either side.

For Creators: Exploring Lenses and Lines

For those in the Creating stage, it’s time to play with different lenses and more complex compositions. Urban environments are perfect for experimenting with wide-angle lenses, which can emphasize the scale of the surroundings, or telephoto lenses to isolate your subject against a busy backdrop.

Ideas:

  • Use wide-angle lenses to capture your pet in a larger urban scene, playing with scale and perspective.
  • Experiment with leading lines—such as roads, pathways, or architectural features—to draw the viewer’s eye toward your pet.
  • Try capturing reflections in windows, puddles, or even mirrored surfaces to add an extra layer of creativity.

For Explorers and Beyond: Mastering Urban Composition

If you’re at the Exploring and Beyond stages, challenge yourself to find unique and unexpected urban compositions. Look for opportunities to incorporate abstract elements, strong lines, and dynamic angles. Use your editing skills to enhance the urban vibe or play with color palettes.

Ideas:

  • Seek out architectural symmetry and use it to frame your pet. This could be doorways, windows, or even staircases.
  • Play with shadows and light—urban settings often provide dramatic lighting that can be used creatively. If you find sparkly lights, lit up street signs or other sources of light, you can use this to create some magical bokeh behind your subject.
  • Consider the color palette of the city. How can you use or enhance these colors to complement your pet’s fur?

Pets and People Challenge

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This was the May Assignment in the Community! You’re welcome to still complete it and post it in the Challenges section of the Community, however you won’t receive a tag for your profile. You can still use it toward your Snoot awards.

This Challenge was brought to you by Sabrina.

A “classic” pose from a client shoot from 2022 (ignore the distracting things left and right 🤓). 

We all know, pets & people can be hard. Tricky to pose, to manage and sometimes it is intimidating to direct our clients/ the owner and tell them what we want them to do. BUT you all know, we only learn when we try something new and leave our comfort zone, even if it’s only with one toe for the start. In this month’s assignment, we want you to try something different than only the „classic“ portrait where the dog and owner sit next to each other and look at the camera or look at each other.

Don’t get me wrong, these photos are beautiful too and for me a must capture in every shoot to get one classic shot. I often use it as the starter pose and work myself towards a more individual pose together with the team to include their uniqueness. We want our clients to go home with a variety of shots showing different moments, feelings, characteristics, moods and energies. You do not need to invent something knew, but we challenge you to try something you never did before. Grab your friend, family member, neighbor, model or even client (when you feel comfortable with it in that situation) with their dog (or take a self portrait if you want to show off or have no other option 😄) and create one image that shows their bond, character, feelings with their connection. 

Some ideas what you could switch up coming from the classic – sitting next to each other – pose with a semi telephoto lens:

  • Pose and position of the dog/owner
  • Angle
  • Lens 
  • Different kinds of movement
  • details and candid moments
  • Visual forms of connection (touch, lines, gazing direction,…)
  • Integration of the location
  • Anything else you can think of!

Just some examples of different poses t show that they help with variety and different moods which give us an overall feeling of their connection, bond and character. Most of the time I use my fave lenses: 135mm, 85mm & 35mm

Little tip on directing people

Take some time to think of your idea or what you want to capture. Maybe save some poses to your phone and try to recreate them. Be bold directing the person in front of you! Only you can see how it looks from the outside and also in the final image. If their hand could be better placed – tell them! If their hair is messy – go fix it! You can do all this very kind and soft. Try to avoid saying something negative and instead say something like „That already looks great, now gently start petting your dog at his chest with your left hand. *moves the hand to a better place* Yes perfect, that is so sweet!“. Reassure them when something is good and make tiny adjustments one after another. That way you’re constantly leading them so they feel safe and confident and at the same time you’re getting many different poses and moments, no stiffness because of the movement and a great variety of shots.

To Complete the Assignment 

Your assignment submission should be a new photo, not one you have lying around (after all, what are you learning/achieving then?)

Go and take your photos! Pick your favourite one (or make a collection of up to 5 images, to compare them. They don’t need to be final edits, light adjustments are enough) and upload them to the Challenges topic in the Community, in order for the entry to count toward your Snoot Awards.

Different Action Challenge

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This was the April Assignment in the Community! You’re welcome to still complete it and post it in the Challenges section of the Community, however you won’t receive a tag for your profile. You can still use it toward your Snoot awards.

With Chris’ “Sideways Action” webinar happening on April 6th, this month’s member assignment is focused around action!

But! In the spirit of creativity, pushing you out of your comfort zone, and encouraging you to try something different, we didn’t want typical action photos, eg., dog running toward the camera/jumping a log toward the camera.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these photos, but the goal of the assignments is to stretch your skillset, to expand your horizons, and to encourage you to experiment and try different things. If you’ve never done a run-to-the-camera photo before, then of course this course be an option for you, but I would encourage the majority of you to explore other options. The same can be said for any of the ideas below. If you’re quite familiar with shooting discdog for example, maybe try something else.

Some ideas could be:

  • sideways action
  • leaping/flying
  • dog sports (agility, discdog, dock diving, herding, canicross, dancing with dogs, search and rescue, etc)
  • two dogs playing
  • treat catching
  • panning/slow shutter speeds
  • anything else you can think of!

Panning action is HARD 😅 (settings here: 1/40 sec, f/4, ISO 100)

To Complete the Assignment

Take some time to think of your idea or what you want to capture. Your assignment submission should be a new photo, not one you have lying around (after all, what are you learning/achieving then?)

Go and take your photos! Pick your favourite one and upload it to the Challenges topic in the Community, in order for the entry to count toward your Snoot Awards.

Gradient Challenge

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Challenges Gradient Challenge

This Challenge is brought to you by Sabrina, and is going to take you through how to add colours to the sky of your photos! This is a rather advanced editing Challenge for those of you who know your way around Photoshop and are ready to play with a number of adjustment layers!

0 RAW Gradients Challenge Final with Logo Web size
Download the RAW Files here

RAW FILES NOTE:  IMG4933.CR3 is the main one and the blue-tagged ones are the additional panorama files. The psb file is the stitched panorama file for those who just want to play with the gradients and do not have the skills yet to stitch it into a panorama. 

About the Challenge

This editing challenge is supposed to help you to get the hang of what gradients are capable of, what different blend modes can achieve, and that a cloudy and rainy day isn’t at all wasted. Because when you’re traveling you don’t always have a chance to go back, so take that photo!

Of course, these edits are a bit more “extreme” and maybe artsy with the fake sunrise. BUT first of all, who says that it needs to look real in order to look good? And second, if you can make such an extreme edit look good, you can use the same techniques to emphasize your existing golden hour/ light situation which might just need a bit of help to really pop. And with the knowledge of combining everything about light and colors with gradients, you can do that and much more.

Even though this is a more advanced edit in Photoshop, feel free to use this photo to play around with gradients to your liking. There is an already stitched panorama Photoshop file to use, if you’re not at this point in your journey yet, so you can have a play too!

The Process

The RAW File

Lightroom:

  1. White balance. I added a tiny bit of yellow and magenta, keeping in mind that I want to go for a warmer edit in the end.
  2. Global adjustments: Just the normal things. Drop highlights a bit, and pull up shadows a bit to get some more of the details back in her face and in the clouds, I did nearly no changes to the colors
  3. Selective edits: I am lazy at this part 😄 Most of the time I use LR subject selection to brighten the whole dog a bit or just the face and make a bigger radial filter where I drop the highlights to create a really soft vignette (which is barely noticeable, so you can leave that out if you want)

This is the Lightroom version:

Now the interesting part in Photoshop starts!

I only had a 35mm lens, there was nearly no shore on the side of the road where I stopped to take the photo. And it was raining, so no chance in going deeper into the water – also water is not Kenzy’s favorite element 😄 That is why I quickly took additional empty frames on location like most of the time. Lucky me, because at home I saw that the rain cover of my camera created a hazy effect on the left and would have ruined the photo if I hadn’t had some extra shots. Panorama for the win!

Creating panorama & retouching

  1. I selected all the photos I might need to create the panorama and opened them as layers in Photoshop. I chose a crop that is a bit bigger than what I wanted the final edit to be.
  2. I deselected all the layers and moved my main photo to the bottom. After that, I selected the next layer above, reduced the opacity to 50%, and used the handlers to position the layer where it needed to be. Back to 100% opacity and creat a mask to mask in the parts I needed. I always try to make the edge as smooth as possible without losing too much time and get back at each layer for a check-up on any weird things happening later. Do that for each layer until your panorama is done. I often stitch my panoramas by hand, you can try if Photoshop or Lightroom does a decent job for once. But mine most of the time doesn’t. 
  3. Crop to the size you want it the final image to be & create a layer that contains all the layers above Cmd+optn+Shift+E (mac)/ Strg+alt+shift+E (win) & duplicate (for safety)
  4. I removed some annoying things in the background on the mountain, her eye boogies, and some smaller things. Nothing big to work on here.
  5. You can sharpen here or in the end but underneath the following adjustment layers
Before Panorama:

After Panorama:

Shaping light

  1. One curves layer brightening the face & chest
  2. One curves layer darkening the edges on the bottom and the sides to create a vignette. Sky stays open for now because we will work on that later
  3. One curves layer with linear contrast dropping the opacity to around 60ish to get back some contrast in the whole picture
  4. Curves layer to get back some details in the sky by darkening the highlights
  5. Levels layer to add some black into the fur again and get back some contrast

Color

To be honest, there is not much happening right there except for removing the yellow color cast in the chest and making the water more of an overall blue-green instead of having blue and green patches. I kept the trees and the rest nearly as they were before because I didn’t know where I would go with this edit at this point. I also desaturated the stones in the foreground because they were distracting.

After that, some dodge & burn aka face and body contouring happened and I added back some color to the eyes in the color group.

Gradient magic

Now to the special and fancy stuff like gradients and gradient maps, which makes it possible to turn the image into something more sepcial!

I wish I could give you some workflow on hand to follow here to achieve exactly this, but it is a trial-and-error process. Some of the gradients I used aren’t doing much in the end and I could have done it with less, but I was experimenting myself because it was the second photo I did this particular “method” on. I know what gradients can do, but never used them like this. Just as a reminder: Allow yourself to experiment and do stuff, that might end up looking crappy. No one needs to see them.

Back to our edit. I used various gradients with different blend modes to get a sunrise effect and I was going for a yellow sun with a bit of blue at the top of the image. Like right before the sun is peeking behind the mountains.

  1. In order to do that I used an empty layer, the gradient tool, and chose a linear gradient that went from light blue to yellow. I positioned it with the yellow above the mountains and the blue on the very edge at the top of the image. The blend mode was on color because first I wanted to add color in the sky. I masked out the sky, but don’t forget to let the light and color spill over the edges of the mountains! 
  2. Duplicated the layer and added some more color and more orange. Mask again, you don’t want the same mask because it will create harsher edges.
  3. On top of that, I added some blue gradients on color blend mode for the water to be more evenly colored in a blue tone which seems to not be touched by the sun yet.
  4. Some radial gradients behind the dog mimic the light coming out behind the mountains and spilling over the edge. Don’t forget to soften the edges of the dog’s mask to avoid the sticker effect
  5. Gradient maps with blues in the shadows and yellows in the highlights over the whole image, except the dog

They are all building up on each other. I used the blend mode color to get more color in the sky, soft light to get a soft hazy light effect with some color, the same for normal blend mode on really low opacity, and also screen for some glow. But keep an eye on not to overpower the dog.

Sky adjustments

Looking at the yellow fake sunrise it felt … fake. That’s why I made some more adjustments and went for the moment before the sun gets up or after it’s gone. When blue hour is fading/ about to start. 

  1. First I changed the colors to more of an orange & violet instead of yellow & blue with 3 Hue/Saturation layers on colorize adding the color I wanted in the parts of the image I wanted it to be (Group “adding color”)
  2. Darken the edges and also bring back more contrast in the clouds.

 

Final touches

  1. I always smoosh the layers with Cmd/Strg + option/alt + Shift + E and open the camera Raw filter to add some clarity around 6-7.
  2. Also, check the histogram for possible peaking and remove with selective editing and reducing highlights.
  3. Added a tiny bit ot contrast or with this one also dehazed a bit to get more contrast. Watch out because the colors become more saturated being darkened and dehazing cools the image down. You may need to add some yellow back in and correct the white balance.

Final Image:

 

Once you've finished the challenge....

Make sure you download this story, save it somewhere safe to collect the whole set, and share it to your socials!

Challenges Gradient Challenge

How to add it to your story (iOS Version, but I’m sure Android is similar?)

  1. Save the image above. Either right click and choose “Save image” or similar option, then send it to your phone, as well as your edited photo. Or, long press on your phone & choose save image. 
  2.  Open Instagram. 
  3. Swipe right to upload a new story
  4.  Tap the bottom left corner. Select the template image.
  5. Go back to your photos app
  6. Press the share button, bottom left corner.
  7. Press “Copy”
  8. Go back to Instagram
  9. Select to add some text, with the aA button along the top menu.
  10. Tap where the flashing text cursor is. Select “paste”
  11. Drag and resize to fit
  12. Remember to tag @inspawrationphotography and the photographer of the photo you edited! (Could be me, or someone else!)
  13. Press “Your Stories” at the bottom to share!
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Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial

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Editing: Tutorials Hijinx in Green: Full Tutorial
DSC01244-Pano-2 DSC01244-Pano-2-Edit
Download the raw Files here

This was such a fun little edit! Making a panorama, taking our overly bright photo and deepening those greens, working through so many of my normal process.

Make sure you download the 4 raw files from above. To take this photo, I used my panorama technique which I cover in depth in the Learning Journey. But in this case, I’d gotten a bit too close to Hijinx as I’d only JUST gotten into position but hadn’t framed up the photo yet, and was expecting him to look toward me, when he looked so beautifully to the side and into this lighter, open space. 

I could either forgo the shot and move backward/change my perspective to be lower, and wait for him to look at me to have better composition…

Or I could take the photo with the perfect gazing direction and expression, and take extra photos of the scene to “build out” later in editing. So, that’s what we’re going to do. 

Make sure you check out the step by step editing process that accompanies this video, but remember! You don’t have to do the exact settings as me, with the exact numbers. 

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Editing Dogs in Landscapes

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Editing: Tutorials Editing Dogs in Landscapes

Watch the video tutorial below to edit this image step by step. My process for editing landscapes is a fair bit different to my normal process in that:

  • I don’t shape the light nearly as much
  • I’m a bit more flexible with colour-grading and don’t mind if the dogs get a little coloured
  • I am not obsessing quite as much about drawing attention to the subject (especially through use of light and dark) but instead about creating a balance between the subject and the landscape
  • I may use self-created presets for series of images taken in the same landscape with similar lighting, to speed up the process
  • I make more use of the HSL panel, and the colour grading panel in LR/ACR than I normally do.
DSC04402 DSC04402-Edit

Beware the glow!

Often, when editing our landscape photos, we need to quite dramatically darken the sky, while brightening our subject. Depending on how you do this, it can quite quickly create a glowing white halo around your subjects. If you’re using the adjustment brush to adjust exposures, this glow will be larger and soft. If you’re using “select subject”, it’s likely to be smaller and sharper.

It’s difficult to get rid of this glow without spending a lot of time very precisely adjusting your masks. Therefore I recommend gradually fading your exposure adjustments, using radial filters in a not-too-specific way, and avoiding as much as possible big exposure adjustments between subject and background. Not always possible! 

One way to see the glow is to zoom right out on your photo and look at it thumbnail size. And make sure you come back to it with fresh eyes later on!

Check your masks

Similar to “beware the glow”, do a good, thorough check of your masks if you’re darkening the sky and brightening your subjects, especially if you’re using a “Select Subject” tool. Often, it can miss small bits and pieces (see below example!) and these can look very strange and out of place!

Watch out as well that the new masking features don’t just blur furry parts of your subject, or parts where some fur meets the background and it has a hard time finding the edges. You will want to fix these masks up.

Below: before & after. If you see these blurry edges, just use the brush tool to either add or remove the effect from where it’s blurry.

Mask blurred edges Mask blurred edges 2
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Dreaming in Green: Full Tutorial

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Dreaming in Green: Deep Green Editing Tutorial Dreaming in Green: Full Tutorial
DSC01244-Pano-2 DSC01244-Pano-2-Edit
Download the raw Files here

This was such a fun little edit! Making a panorama, taking our overly bright photo and deepening those greens, working through so many of my normal process.

Make sure you download the 4 raw files from above. To take this photo, I used my panorama technique which I cover in depth in the Learning Journey. But in this case, I’d gotten a bit too close to Hijinx as I’d only JUST gotten into position but hadn’t framed up the photo yet, and was expecting him to look toward me, when he looked so beautifully to the side and into this lighter, open space. 

I could either forgo the shot and move backward/change my perspective to be lower, and wait for him to look at me to have better composition…

Or I could take the photo with the perfect gazing direction and expression, and take extra photos of the scene to “build out” later in editing. So, that’s what we’re going to do. 

Make sure you check out the step by step editing process that accompanies this video, but remember! You don’t have to do the exact settings as me, with the exact numbers. 

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Editing Toolbox: Reduce Highlights

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Editing Tools & Techniques Editing Toolbox: Reduce Highlights

As always, there’s about 100 ways to do things or fix problems when it comes to editing, so this toolbox goes through a few options for you.

Keep in mind that how effective these methods will be depends on how large the blown out areas are. If you have HUGE white blobs, this is going to be much harder to fix and might be something you look at fixing in camera, on location in future. Bracketing, under-exposing, or using an external light source or reflector could help.

Some options for fixing/reducing blown highlights include:

  • Lower highlights in LR and reduce clarity
  • Copy/paste some bokeh from somewhere else in the background
  • Clone stamp bokeh from somewhere else in the background
  • Using Generative Fill in Photoshop (video below)
  • Use motion blur on the bokeh
  • Use gaussian blur on the bokeh (I recommend you add noise afterwards)
  • Fill in the white spots with the brush tool in a colour from the outside of the bokeh
  • cover the bokeh with a radial gradient, or add haze in Adobe Camera Raw.

Your main goals are probably going to be to:

  • soften the edges of the blown out areas so they aren’t so sharp
  • add some colour so it isn’t so white

Keeping that in mind will help you decide what you want to do, and how to do it with the tools available to you.

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“Joy” Challenge

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Challenges “Joy” Challenge

The “Joy Challenge” is all about capturing the essence of joy in your pet photography. Even the most serious dog can show joy in the right circumstances, and there’s nothing better than looking back on joyful photos.

Here are some guidelines to get you started:

  1. Focus on the dog’s expression: The key to capturing joy in a pet photo is to focus on the dog’s expression. Look for moments when the dog is relaxed and happy, with an open mouth, raised ears, and bright eyes.

  2. Choose a bright and happy location: To enhance the joyful mood, choose a bright and happy location for your photo shoot. Beaches, flowers, and plenty of bokeh can all create the feeling of joy. Avoid deep dark forests, solid backgrounds and places that feel a bit “closed in”. 

  3. Interaction can create joy! Get your dog moving! Interact with your dog or have your owner interact. Prompt them to cuddle, play and be silly. Be natural with your dog and muck around. These will create genuine moments of laughter and joy together. 

  4. Use a fast shutter speed if you’re working with more candid moments and movement: To capture your dog in motion and to avoid blurry images, use a fast shutter speed, over 1/1250 sec. This will help to freeze the moment and capture the essence of joy in your pet’s expression.

  5. Edit for brightness and color: In post-processing, edit your photos for brightness and color. By going dark and moody, you likely won’t be supporting that bright, joyful mood you want to create. Remember as well that warmth has more of a feeling of joy than cooler temperatures.

Get to it! Make sure you check out the Challenges rules before you get started. Can’t wait to see your joyful photos!

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Layers Flowchart

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Editing Tools & Techniques Layers Flowchart

I’ve been asked a couple of times whether there are lessons or resources on layers, specifically:

  • when to group and hide layers
  • where in the process to do clone/healing layers
  • what the hell is going on with smooshed layers

The problem was, the answer always begins with: “It depends.”

After all, whether or not you turn off layers depends what you have, and what type of layers are there. Where you do your clone stamp depends on what you’ve done already. 

So I made this flow-chart. I’ve tried to cover as many possible editing scenarios as I can think of, and of course some scenarios will have more than one “thing” that you’ve already done or WANT to do.

The important thing is to understand why it might be important to do things in a certain order, so you can make smart decisions about your workflow. I’ve tried to include some explanations as to why I would do things certain ways. 

As this is a Canva whiteboard, I can add or change whatever is there easily, so if you think I’ve missed something, haven’t explained something well, or want something added, let me know in the comments box at the bottom of this lesson. 

You do not need a Canva account to view it, and you can zoom in and out and navigate around. You can also download a .pdf version but it might be more difficult to read and can’t be updated if anything changes – unless you download a new version.

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