I have been working on a new project for my OCA Creative Arts degree (exploring the presentation of a 'Persuasive Document'). This project explores what my local landscape would look like from the eyes of my dog. All too often we ignore the specific detail of a place (especially in the countryside, where our eyes are drawn to the beauty of the landscape as a whole) and I wanted to capture the essence of this detail through an animal that is thorough in his approach to exploration (and my dog is a very 'nosy' animal).Through research into how dogs see, I shot the images in colour, but then converted them to black-and-white, whilst leaving any shades of blue remaining within the shot (dogs do have slight colour-vision, centred around shades of blue). I also shot the images in as wide an angle as possible (24mm on the lens that I have) to take into account his increased field of vision. I shot the images from my dog's point-of-view, thereby being close to the ground, extremely close-up to the subject and often 'tilted' to simulate the way he would move his head to explore what he found.
Whenever he stopped at something specific, I photographed what he was 'sniffing' out. In this way I hoped to capture not only the detailed sights of the countryside, but also aspects of smell (which drew my dog to the images taken), thereby creating a journey that is both visual and olfactory. It also enabled the decision-making aspect of when to take a photograph determined by my dog; ie, when he decided there was something worth stopping for, then I took a picture.
The shot at the top of this post was one selected from 8 that I chose for the Project, taken on a single walk in Sandringham; however, I intend to take the study further and explore this concept in greater depth.
