Working Like a Dog, part 1.
I've had a few different photography project ideas around dogs in the past, but they always felt a little bit generic and not super personal to me until I finally landed on this idea of Dogs with Jobs… or Working Like a Dog.
This popped into my head a few months ago and it was only after I started researching it, I found out there was actually a TV series in the year 2000 under the same name with a similar concept. So maybe not as unique to me as I had hoped, but I'm still going forward with this project and for the moment, I'm sticking with the name. Maybe we have to change it later for legal reasons.
Getting Started
With your idea in place, you need to start figuring out how to put you and your camera in the right locations with the right subjects to actually start executing this project.
So in my particular case, this meant contacting people who work with working dogs, either training them or working with them professionally, and figuring out how I can get in the same space as them. To be able to photograph them either on the job or while they're doing a training day.
I started simply by just cold emailing a few different dog trainers in the Southwest of England while we were staying there for a bit, and I managed to get a couple of emails out to some working dog trainers around herding dogs, gun dogs, et cetera.
And luckily, despite all of the non-responses I got, I also got one response from a lovely trainer named Beth who works training sheepdogs. Beth was more than happy to let me and Lisa actually shadow a morning training session with her two dogs and also a couple of dogs from one of her clients who she'd worked with for a long time.
In return, I would then send all of the images you're going to see in this video to Beth and her client for them to use however they like.
On the Job: Sky, Dev, and the Herding Process
Enter Sky and Dev, two gorgeous border collie sheepdogs trained by Beth. I think combined, these two dogs have more brain cells than I do.
Portraits & Action Shots
For each set of dogs and their trainer in different professions, I know that I definitely want like some portrait shots as kind of the header for each section of this project, or herding any sheep. And I think these actual like poses and compositions are exactly what I was after.
With the portraits pretty much in the bag, I had a couple of ideas for specific sort of action mid herding shots that I really wanted to get with at least one of the dogs here.
We first started dabbling around, around the field, letting Sky sort of kick off the session while Dev was resting and having Sky herding the sheep in different parts of the field. And of course we were going between like bright, harsh sunlight, and then also into the shade a little bit.
We did get one very interesting moment with Sky kind of standing on the sheep, which is kind of when she holds them in position. And they were kind of into a corner of the field. One of them did then kind of try and break away, but Sky quickly, very like impressively controlled the sheep and brought it back.
Honestly seeing the dogs working this way close up was like mesmerising. I'd seen like videos and stuff here and there and like from a distance, but actually getting to be right up there with them was an amazing experience.
These shots I got with Sky here were okay, but they weren't exactly what I had in my head. I knew I kind of wanted a shot similar to this, but with the sheep in the foreground, very much filling the entire lower third foreground of the frame. So we started to do something a little bit differently once we started working with Dev.
Shift in Perspective & Composition
We tried moving to a large shady patch underneath this very big tree at the bottom of the field, once we'd started working with Dev, herding all of the sheep together into a slightly different part of the field.
While Dev was standing on the sheep, I was overhead above like the little mini flock of sheep and just trying to frame them in the foreground while having Dev sort of in control in the background. I tried this both in landscape and portrait orientation.
Personally, I think the portrait orientation kind of just lends more to this composition because it is very much a top to bottom composition, much more than a left to right composition. I always think if the information goes from top to bottom, portrait is often the preferred orientation, whereas if the information is going from left to right, landscape is a little bit better.
So here we have all of the sheep in the foreground, but slightly soft and out of focus with Dev nice and sharp in the top of the frame. I think it's also the size difference between all of the individual sheep and also together as a flock. And then there's one pretty small border collie that is just hyper-focused, in control, loving life. I really like this image.
Not long later, Dev was in a similar position only this time we actually have the sheep all the way up against the bush. So I wasn't now behind the sheep. Instead, I was behind Dev.
Dev was incredibly comfortable with you getting right close while he was focusing on doing something. He's just there, kind of, he would naturally just stand on the sheep and guard them on his own, but he's also incredibly well-behaved, incredibly responsive, and listening to Beth's commands. So while he was there, she just had him lying down.
And I was able to get this kind of over-the-head, almost POV shot from Dev's perspective, like looking down his back and through his ears at the sheep. I really, really, really like this shot. I always like having it with the foreground out of focus, but giving us some context information and perspective.
I think looking down Dev's ears like this at the sheep, it feels like looking down the crosshairs of an old weapon, only in this situation, the weapon is like a high-energy border collie, obsessed with herding sheep.
So as a pair of images, I really like what these two particular shots do when it comes to the relationship between the sheep and the sheep dogs in the herding process. They're both in portrait orientation, but I do have them in landscape as well. And I think these would work towards a final project later.
Having this kind of shift of perspective, there's kind of like one front-on of the sheep dog and then the other sort of the point of view of the sheep dog. These kind of work, I could definitely imagine these in a single page spread in a book or as part of an exhibition.
Why Start this Project?
Why did I actually start this Dogs with Jobs photography project in the first place?
Well, to be completely honest with you, I was burnt out beyond belief for the last like year. Pretty much since we left Manchester and started traveling full-time, I've just not had the strongest connection with my photography or with the videos I've been making. To be honest, it's felt much more like a job and much less something that I'm truly enjoying. And it was not very fun. I found myself shooting stuff because I thought I should rather than shooting stuff that I was really, really interested in.
So this Dogs with Jobs photography project has already made me feel a much stronger connection to my images, especially because I get to share them with other people like the trainers, like Beth. That gives me a lot more satisfaction than just photos to throw up on the ground, which doesn't really bring me any joy whatsoever.
I realized that the sort of photography that I like doing the most, that really drives me to do more of it, is the photography that creates connections. And this can be taking a portrait of someone in the street and then sharing with them later. Maybe you follow each other online, keep up with what they're doing. You sort of made a connection through photography in the real world.
But this Dogs with Jobs project, I think is kind of a project that brings out all the best sides of photography for me. It connects me back to what first sort of got me taking photos, which were my dogs growing up. And it also gives me a reason to share things with the new people I might meet in different parts of the world.
Whether it's a dog portrait on the street or just a normal everyday domestic dog, that's great, share the photo with them. But the Dogs with Jobs project also kind of brings eyes onto different roles that dogs play in people's lives around the world that actually gets me quite excited and I'm actually fairly passionate about. It gives me something I'm already more interested in, the topic and the subject itself, beyond just the photography.
Sometimes I think we can look at photography and cameras too much as tools and not as kind of a medium. Like it's a medium for connection and it's a medium for creating something much more than it is a tool for capturing something. It's more like, it's not a tool, it's a paintbrush. Do you know what I mean? And I like the idea of using a camera as a paintbrush to tell a story, to make connections. For me, that's more fulfilling.
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What style can I expect from these presets?
These presets are based on specific Kodak Film Stocks, Fujifilm Film Stocks and various film stocks I have shot in various lighting conditions which you can see in the preview images for each pack.
How many presets are in this pack?
30 - with low and high grain versions for each preset.
Each preset has both .xmp and .dng file types.
Which software supports these presets?
You can choose from these Adobe softwares:
Lightroom Classic
Lightroom CC Desktop
Lightroom CC Mobile
Photoshop (adobe camera raw)
