D7200 - Raccoon River Retriever Puppies
Equipment Used: Nikon D7200, Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 lense, Lightroom and Photoshop CC
This spring, Raccoon River Retrievers had a litter of puppies and before they got delivered to their new owners, I ventured over with the camera to try and capture them in their playful mood. When they got let out of their kennel, they didn’t stay still much while playing in the grass and with each other. I had to act quick to frame the shot and push the shutter since they didn’t stay in their pose for very long.
The D7200 was used on the 70-200mm lense and I had the camera in aperture priority mode with an aperture of f4.0 and ISO ranged 400-640. For the majority of the puppy play time, these settings kept the shutter speed above 1/500 of a second to help freeze their action.
In Lightroom, I created a custom preset by adjusting the tone and presence sliders to bring out the shadows and detail in the puppy. The puppies had great looking coats of fur so I didn’t need to adjust the slider for the color of black very much at all. To finish off the edits in LR, I cropped the images.
The puppies started to slow down after their play time and headed back into their kennel and didn’t take long for them to start to fall asleep and probably dream of retrieving pheasants and greenheads.
