{"id":10103,"date":"2014-12-03T08:44:53","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T13:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=10103"},"modified":"2014-12-03T08:44:53","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T13:44:53","slug":"photo-of-the-day-my-name-is-donder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2014\/12\/03\/photo-of-the-day-my-name-is-donder\/","title":{"rendered":"Photo of the day: My Name is Donder"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>his might be one of my favourite Christmas photos of the boys ever. My friend Henry on Flickr gave this one an alternate title that I also really like: we’re going to need a bigger wagon!<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

Fun, right? The expression on the reindeer slays me. That’s a Donder face if there ever was one.<\/p>\n

This one almost went sideways on me right from the start. The idea was to have Bella pulling the wagon, and I was going to put some reindeer antlers on her in the style of Max the dog from the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Except as I was getting the boys settled on the wagon, she managed to find a pile of poop in the front yard and roll in it. We don’t actually allow her to poop in the front yard, so I have some other neighbourhood dog to thank for that gift. And we were quickly losing the light, so we had to improvise. <\/p>\n

This was the original shot:<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

I loved the expressions on their faces. The dog was a bit blurred though, and even with a few other poses to choose from, it just wasn’t working out to be what I imaged. The boys had been good sports and adorable, though, so I wanted to make it work.<\/p>\n

I started by cloning Bella and Beloved out of the image and editing it for exposure and white balance. I found the perfect reindeer, but he was too big for the canvas, so I extended the edges of it upwards and to the right. I positioned the reindeer and tweaked him a bit so it looked like he was standing in the grass. He was already wearing the red harness, so I took Bella’s leather leash from one of the other poses I hadn’t used and painted it to match the harness, then stretched it to fit into Lucas’s hand. And I painted a bit of a shadow for the reindeer. I had to play a bit with the colour and contrast of the reindeer to look like he was actually standing in the same light as the boys, and then I tweaked it a bit more overall for the bright and contrasty look. <\/p>\n

What do you think? It makes me chuckle when I look at it, which makes it a win in my books!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This might be one of my favourite Christmas photos of the boys ever. My friend Henry on Flickr gave this one an alternate title that I also really like: we’re going to need a bigger wagon! Fun, right? The expression on the reindeer slays me. That’s a Donder face if there ever was one. This … Continue reading “Photo of the day: My Name is Donder”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ah-me-boys","category-project-365"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10103"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10105,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10103\/revisions\/10105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}