I took this picture of my parents dog back when he was a puppy about a year or two ago, when my Dad thought he might see if he could fit inside this oblong vase. I thought he would make a nice subject for a dynamic black and white photo, so I went to work and this was the end product.

Contrast: Contrast is the key with this photo because it’s black and white. To create an interesting, dynamic amount of black and white contrast, I used a black and white adjustment layer, as well as a levels adjustment layer and tweaked the histogram as well as the color sliders to come to a result where I had some rich blacks, and some darker greys. The results speak for themselves.

Repetition: I didn’t want too much repetition, because the photo was already going to be limited by color. I did want the subject to have a higher contrast than the background/carpet, and also wanted to have a vignette to further accent the subject.

Alignment: The subject was already aligned towards the center of the photo in the original, and I thought that was good enough for my purposes here.

Proximity: I created the vignette and made it pretty close to the subject, to draw the viewers eyes in even more.

Font/Color: N/a