It's week 40 of the 52 Week Pet Photography project and the theme is isolation. I played around with a number of ideas but decided to go for both a metaphorical interpretation as well as a technical one in one image. 

I headed out to a small wooded area in Carrollton, TX that appears pretty isolated despite being surrounded by about 22 baseball and soccer fields as part of the McInnish Sports Complex that borders the Elm Fork Nature preserve which is a tributary of the Elm Fork River that run through Dallas.  

Adjacent to the nature preserve, I knew I could capture an image in which Ginger would look very alone with no other signs of civilization. I caught a partly cloudy day to allow for some filtered sun behind my subject but not directly on her and brought a portable strobe help isolate her from the background as the brightest part of the image (that's some of the the technical part - your eye is always naturally drawn to the brightest part of an image, so it works nicely when that's your intended subject). 

This was photographed at f/2.8 which is a very shallow depth of field that also helps isolate the subject from the background as everything behind that thin slice of focus gets blurred in a dreamy sort of way called "bokeh".  I wanted to darken the background to increase the drama of the image so increased the shutter speed to 1/200 of a second to reduce the ambient light entering the image. Ok, that's all the technical stuff done now. 

This all sounds like it went swimmingly doesn't it? Well, I didn't count on the mosquitos. Sooooo many mosquitoes as a result of all the rain we've had recently. Both Ginger and I were getting eaten alive so I couldn't get out of there fast enough! Once I had the exposure dialed in, I snapped a few frames and the minute I saw a good one, we packed up and went home to develop the image and write this post (oh and to put some cortisone on my mosquito bites, argh!). 

(click on images to see full screen)