Ratsicles
Posted : 12/11/2007 5:47:59 PM
How do you get them to cooperate?? My dogs literally wait until I raise the camera then they run in different directions!! They all look so good! Especially Culley!
It helped that I was sitting on the steps and effectively had them completely cornered on the porch. 
Once they realized they couldn't slip by me, I told them all to lie down. Culley takes commands pretty seriously (we're pretty sure he was abused before we got him...can't prove it, but his behavior makes it pretty likely) so you'll notice he didn't get up or move in any of the pictures after I had him laying down. Butter tried, but I took too long, and he got distracted. Punch is 4 months old and has the attention span of a gnat so I didn't expect much of him.
Wow, I had no clue Culley was that small! What a cute teeny little guy! (Sorry, my sister's pit bull is 20.5 inches and 75 pounds, so that's about how big I think most pitty's are. Guess I'm mistaken!)
Yeah, pit bulls vary HUGELY in size- I've seen adult pits as small as 10 pounds (!) and some overbred ones who were over 90 pounds. The trend now is sadly, "BIGGER = BETTER!!!" among BYBs so most pit bulls you see will tend towards the large side. The concesus among responsible pit bull breeders though- the ones who actually breed for working ability(hog hunting, weightpull, etc) is that the original pit bull was a very athletic, muscular, medium sized dog. If you look at pictures of pit bulls from 60+ years ago, you'll see that most of them were around Culley's size or even smaller- and looked more like terriers than bulldogs, really. Sadly, BYBs now breed for a "tougher" looking, heavier dog- so you get 100 pound dogs that are obviously crossed with english bulldogs and mastiffs- that are absolutely nothing like REAL pit bulls. They're overweight, mishappen, human aggressive messes that have all of the health problems of english bulldogs and then some. It's sad- most of the public's mental images of a "pit bull" are of those pit bull mixes churned out by BYBs, rather than the real thing.
So yeah...Culley's conformation sucks, and he's built like a bitch, but he's within the correct size range. Punchy, while not so horribly bred that he doesn't resemble a proper pit bull, is at least going to be very oversized. I wouldn't be surprised if he reached 70-80 pounds.
How do you get that hazy, old time fashioned look to your photos? It's really beautiful!
I use Paint.Net, which is a free photo editing program. I just ran them through a Soften Portrait filter and then messed with the contrast and saturation, and then sharpened them up some. So, the originals look like this:
and the finished one looks like this:
Thanks for the compliments everyone!