SAVING FACES

My human got an email the other day asking about a big problem all pug picture-takers face: Getting your camera to make a cute puggy face look like a cute puggy face and not a dark blob.

She says pug faces are hard for a few reasons:

Problem #1: Cameras don't like extremes
Cameras have a hard time with dark AND light in the same picture (think: light pug body/dark pug face... brother Dutch's entire body). So when your camera sees a fawn pug like me, it says: Uh, black AND that light fawn-color in the same place? Are you kidding?? I can really only get one of them right. This thing is mostly fawn-color so I guess I'm supposed to get the fawn-color right. Sorry about those dark parts. Hope they weren't important.

Problem #2: Cameras are stupid
A camera doesn't know -or even care- what cute is. All it cares about is light and there's no such thing as cute light. Your camera takes a picture by measuring the amount of light bouncing off stuff and then deciding how much light needs to be inside the camera to make a picture of that stuff come out good. Light-colored things tell the camera to let a little bit of light inside; dark things tell the camera to let a lot of light inside.

A pug like me is like 90% light-colored, so the camera thinks: oh, a light-colored thing. I don't need to let in much light to take this picture. So the camera lets in just enough light to make my light-colored puggy body look good.... and my face turns into a black blob because there isn't enough light inside the camera to create the details in my dark puggy eyes/nose/wrinkles.

That's probably waaaay more than you wanted to know about cameras... but the moral of the story is that cameras don't like pugs (and they HATE dalmatians). My human says there are things you can do to help your camera take better pug pictures (good for all dogs and black puggies too):

* Look for a setting that tells your camera to pay more attention to whatever's in the middle of a picture (it's called center-weighted metering, check your manual). Keep your pug's face in the center and it shouldn't turn into a blob. [note from human: Personally, I never use this setting - so if you don't have it on your camera, don't worry]

* Get as much light on your pug's face as possible. This means always always ALWAYS stand between the lightsource and your pug when taking a picture. When the source of light is behind YOU, it will be in front of (shining on) your pug. Big bright windows are really good.

Example: http://dailypuglet.blogspot.com/2009/08/caught.html

See those white rectangle in my eyes? That's a window. My human was standing between me and a big window and took that picture with a little $100 Casio. No giant fancy scary(!) camera needed.

* If you really want to get super-fancy (sort of), you can use a reflector to "bounce" light onto a pug's face. A reflector can be anything white. A light colored wall will work, so will a silver car-window shade thingy or 39cent piece of white posterboard. The idea is to have your pug facing whatever it is you're using as a reflector. If you experiment, it will make more sense than me trying to explain how to do it :)

Good luck with your cameras. May the face be with you!