Embark Challenge 2 “Get Down” - My First Top 20!

This second Embark challenge was a bit of a mind spin. The brief was very open, the only requirements being that you had to get low to the ground.

Having such an open brief sounds simple but it was actually very difficult to come up with an image I was happy with.

Initially I wanted to get an image of a border collie really low to the ground looking like they were stalking me. This would make both of us hit the brief, me laying on the ground and the collie nearly belly to the ground.

This image never came to pass, none of our dogs have enough ‘eye’ to make it work. However, in the time that I was shooting for this challenge, I photographed the Ultimate Stock Dog Challenge. I laid in the dirt for two days straight and definitely got some images that hit the brief.

While I love these images, I didn’t think they would do well for the Embark challenge, the backgrounds are very distracting, and the light was quite harsh. This was devastating because I knew I wasn’t going to get that photo of a dog with a lot of ‘eye’ at home.

I was running out of time, I thought for sure I was going to get my ‘Get Down’ image at the USD but now I was only a few days out from the submission deadline with no photo to submit.

The day before the deadline we took our main girl, who has just had a break from work due to having pups, to bring our trainer mob in. These photos I could only describe as ‘meh’. The lighting was harsh and there was nothing really special about them.

So, now I am less that 24 hours out from the deadline with no image to submit… que panic!

In the meantime, I ended up getting extremely sick, going down to Deniliquin for a CT scan and everything. I was thinking I was just going to have to submit an image from the USD knowing I wouldn’t get good feedback on it.

Saturday morning though I woke up determined, I was getting a photo for this challenge. So, I gulped some panadol and we took Tex over to the trusty shearing shed. Tex has a favourite toy that I thought we might be able to coax him to stalk towards the camera with.

He was such a good model for us, and even though we did get some images that fit what I had in my head, I ended up choosing an image to submit that I took to check my settings. Here are the images I didn’t choose.

Even though I was laying on my belly for these images, I didn’t think they quite hit the brief due to the wide angle not showing enough of the foreground out of focus.

Here is the image I submitted for the Get Down challenge.

Tex being the perfect model

I chose this image because I thought it was very technically correct, the eyes are sharp, the camera is on the ground, so the foreground is blurry. It is a natural black background, edited black backgrounds can be very difficult to achieve on a fluffy dog and it was the first time I had actually attempted one on a dog and not a horse!

When the feedback video was published, I couldn’t help but feel this tight worry in my chest about what Craig and Charlotte would say. I know it’s not supposed to be a competition but after my image for “Colouriffic” wasn’t shortlisted I couldn’t help but really hope my image made top 20.

After watching the whole three hours of image critique (mine was the last one!), we did it, Tex made the top 20 and was only just short of making top 10! The feedback was really great, with nothing too much to pick on there were some minor things to tidy up in the image and they also suggested a square crop to take away the heaviness that comes with too much black in the top of the image.

Here is the final image I resubmitted after the feedback!

I am so stoked to have made the top 20 and I would love to hear your thoughts!

The next theme is “Composition 101” and this is already proving to be another one that will challenge me!