Model Session ~ Bert the Dogue de Bordeaux at New Farm Park, Brisbane

As soon as I saw Bert’s application for my commercial model database, I just knew I had to meet him! It’s no secret that I love big dogs, and I’d never had the opportunity to photograph a Dogue de Bordeaux before. New Farm Park is a pretty challenging location so I like using it to test out potential commercial models.

We started off around the back of the Powerhouse building at the big red flood sculpture. This makes a fantastic background for adding some colour and texture. When shooting on auto white balance (as I do most of the time) the camera can often be fooled by large areas of saturated colour and you can end up with some unexpected results. In this video tutorial, I step through editing the photo below using the histogram in Adobe Lightroom.

When bribing working with big dogs with floppy chops like Bert, it’s inevitable that there will be some slobber! Or lots of slobber, in his case.

I love how they’ve kept some of the features of the original buildings at the Powerhouse site, resulting in lots of cool little nooks with interesting textures and features.

The surrounding parkland is beautiful too, especially in September/October when the Jacaranda trees are in bloom. There are quite a lot of distractions as it does get busy with people and other dogs, especially on weekends, but Bert handled it all in his stride.

Doggy drinking shots are so much fun! Using a wide angle and a very fast shutter speed and shooting like crazy is the key to these shots. The extra sparkles are due to water droplets on the end of the lens. Those big sloppy chops again!

The purple Jacaranda blooms were just begging to be captured, so I got down low and shot upwards into the trees. Shooting from a low angle is always interesting with dogs too, as we often only view them from above.

Some of the expressions Bert pulled for me were hilarious!

If you’d like to find out more about my commercial model database, go to my website and check out all the info. If your dog meets the application criteria, I’d love to include them!