Okay, maybe it's not a poodle.   But I needed a creative title and Lyra, as a labradoodle, is   "poodle-esque" enough, so I'm sticking with that in this blog post title.

There is a beautiful field near my home, a rare find in a city, but we're blessed with lots of little countryside type cutouts. Let's face it, for photoshoot featuring a dog (or small family, for that matter), one doesn't necessarily need a  large landscape to create a memorable image. So, I asked a good friend if I could photograph her puppy, since I wanted to practice with my new camera, which boasts an insane ability to track animals' eyeballs.   How wild is that? 

Lyra still behaves as a puppy. That is to say she leaps and bounds tirelessly and is skittish enough that keeping her on a leach is absolutely necessary, for her safety primarily.   In this session, I practiced with a technique I learned online from "Unleashed Pet Photography Education" whereby you take an image of the dog and owner first, then the landscape separately.   You then stack the images in photoshop and auto align the images, making masking the subject and leash out virtually effortless.   Here's the link to this wonderfully simple technique.   (Another educational site for pet photography I thoroughly enjoy is "That Tog Spot". Delightful instructor!) So my photo went from one with Lyra and her owner, to Lyra alone (safe) in the field. Below are the two images I used in executing this final image.