I am so happy to eventually share the photographs from Anna and Leigh's photo shoot. The images have been under wraps for over a month as they were a surprise present for their mother's birthday.
I arranged to meet Anna and Leigh at Balloch Castle. We also met their dad there who had smuggled the family dog 'Kuper' out from under their mum's nose especially for the photo shoot. As you can see from the photographs Kuper is a very handsome Bernese Mountain dog and he certainly turned a few heads as we wandered the grounds of Balloch Castle.
We started the session the way I like to start most of my photo sessions, with some simple walking shots. This helps release any nervous energy that folk may have and also helps the dog work off that 'just arrived at the park' excitement.
As we wandered down towards the banks of Loch Lomond we were sharing dog stories, always my favourite topic of conversation. Anna and Leigh told me that they used to have another Bernese mountain dog called Kai, who was actually Kuper's father but he had sadly passed away. Unfortunately, they had never had any professional photos of the two dogs taken together and wondered if it would be possible to photoshop Kai into one of the photos I was going to take that day. Never one to shy away from a photography challenge, I agreed to give it a shot. However as I hadn't seen any of the original photos of Kai matching lighting and angles could have been difficult.
After the shoot Anna sent through a few different photos of Kai that she thought might work. As it turns out the photo that I decided to use was also taken at Balloch Castle. I chose this image as it best matched the lighting I had used in the images I took down at the shore but there were still a few things I had to tweek. Firstly, I had to adjust the colour temperature and the exposure to match my photo before meticulously cutting Kai off the background. I then dropped the image of Kai onto my photo and resized him to the correct scale and placed him in the correct position. I also had to paint in a light shadow underneath Kai to make it look like he had always been there and decided to swap the sky for something a bit more interesting.
Anna also requested a more ghostly image which I was happy to do, I particularly like the one where Leigh and Anna are looking at each other and it looks like the dogs are doing the same.
We then moved onto find a different location and stumbled across a cute wee waterfall were we stopped for some more photographs.
On our loop back towards the castle, I spotted a great tree which would work perfectly for some sitting shots and had a lovely backdrop for some more dog portraits.
It was then just a short stroll back to the castle. We couldn't leave without getting at least one photograph with Balloch Castle in the background and maybe one more of cheeky wee Kuper.
Location based family shoots available from £149. Check out the website for more details.
www.danielmainland.com/family