Underwater Dogs

UNDERWATER DOGS:
This book is simple, it’s photos taken of dogs underwater by photographer Seth Casteel. Each photo shows a dog doing different acts while underwater such as jumping in after a ball, sticking their head under it, standing, swimming, and many other poses. The book is 144 pages with the photos printed on gloss paper. It’s size is 8.8 x 10.5, which is pretty normal for photography books.

THE PHOTOS:
If you love dogs or even like them you will enjoy looking at this books. With the right lighting and the correct angel what would have been a ok photo becomes amazing. Some of these photos in Underwater Dogs are just that, amazing. Seth Casteel has used the water as the subject for making the dogs interesting. We’ve seen dogs make similar expressions before but they were made and gone in a flash but in these photos the water has been able to slow those features down enough to be captured nicely on film. It’s also a nice feature seeing the water rippling, bubbling, and forming around the dog.

What I think makes Underwater Dogs so popular, and it has been getting a lot of talk from some well know sources, is that it puts the dogs right in your face. The dogs are shot up close or with a zoom lens where they are taking up most of the photo and feel like they are right in your face. Some of the faces the dogs make are pretty funny, some are even a little on the scary side with all those teeth, but there are a few that are amazing. But for me, what I found the most interesting and liked aspect of the photos is how the water reacts to the dogs. I liked looking at how with the photo of Raika, all the bubbles from this Belgian Tervuren jumping in the water was forming an outline of the dog. The water in these photos are a little more amazing to me than the dogs but the dogs are still quite photogenic. It’s a nice book, though it still has a few flaws in it that could have made it a lot better.

I think that the photos would have really came off the pages if it had been printed on high gloss paper rather than just plain gloss. The shine would have brought out the details in the water a lot more than the gloss does. Also, some of the of the photos on the pages where set up making me fight with the book just to be able to see what was going on in the photo. With some of the single photos that could have been shown on one page, about an inch of them was printed on the opposite page. On some of these it didn’t matter much because all it was showing was the edge of the water but some had parts of the dog and/or water in it but because it’s been put in the spine of the book I couldn’t get the pages laid flat to see the full photo. Lastly, being a photographer myself, I was looking for what kind of camera and lens he had used for the photos. I don’t want to know all his secrets and I know that as a non-photographer looking at this that kind of information is boring, but like I said I’m a photographer and knowing the cameras and lenses that do good work is always interesting and good to know.