my fairy dogmother

“My Fairy Dogmother” is my second International Photographic Competition Loan image . It is another “case filler”, an image not originally intended for competition and stuck into a case to fill it out. I was shooting an image for a children’s book I’m working on called “Finch and The Spot Fairy”. I was trying out various crowns to see how they would photograph and Sparrow was modeling with her typical bored expression. “Yeah, fine. But there had better be treats later.”

This was the final image:

One of the test images turned out pretty well – I loved the way the light fell on her so I tacked on some wings and posted her on my business page. The post. Blew. Up. The image reached over 48 THOUSAND people and was shared over 2,000 times. That’s… uh… a bit more than my usual reach.

So when I was looking for an image to pad out my case for the spring State Print Competition, I figured I would go with my FB followers’ gut and add this one. I took off the wings (no added elements for a portrait submission) and submitted “My Fairy Dogmother.” It scored an 82 with no challenge. That seemed about right to me so I prepared to submit it to our Northeast District competition. I made a few tweaks, adding a bit of light, took off the color grading, taking down some highlights on the crown, toning down the background texture, and fixing some pearls that were damaged.

The image went all the way to the International Print Competition, was chosen for their Loan Collection, then was a finalist at the Grand Imaging Awards in the animal category, and won third place.

Image posted on Facebook.

PPA liked it too - they’ve been using it to promote print competition ever since!

Final image submitted to print competition.