Inspired Image

To create this image, I put up a tarp for the background to mimic Wegman’s solid color backgrounds, and put a vest on my dog, Anubis, for the accessory. Anubis doesn’t like wearing any kind of clothing, made for dogs or not, and freezes up and refuses to move when wearing anything. This made her surprisingly easy to pose, because with a few treats she would sit down and not move for minutes at a time, perfect for a photoshoot. I wanted to get a two-thirds shot of her to show off the vest and the background, but the tarp wasn’t big enough to cover the full frame, so I had to get creative. For this particular shot, I took an angle that gave the illusion of a longer tarp and cropped out the part of the photo that went past the background after the fact. I also edited the picture to have low key lighting, similar to a lot of Wegman’s photography. At first, I wanted to use a polaroid to photograph Anubis, mimicking Wegman’s signature collections, but I didn’t have the means to do this, so instead I opted for a combination of his low key lighting technique and used Anubis as the subject. The style of clothing Anubis is dressed in along with the light pink background hint at an early 2000s photoshoot vibes, but instead of a supermodel, it’s a dog. The diversion of expectations is pretty funny to me, at least. What upsets me about this photo is that, yet again, I attempted and failed at avoiding the yellowish artificial lighting of ceiling lamps. It took editing to get rid of the gross glow and overall just made it difficult to come up with a worthy end product. But I’m pretty happy with how this shot turned out.