First attempt with the dogs. C&C please

My wife hates having her picture taken so refuses to pose, and she's not ready to let me post pics of our daughter, so for now I get to work with the dogs. These guys are not easy to capture.

My biggest problem is that I don't have as much time to shoot as I hoped, so I'm not getting that much time to learn. I can see the (viewer's) right side of the dogs muzzles is a bit blown out, but not sure how to correct that. Also, the only pp done was minor cloning and size reduction. One of these days in my "spare time" I'll learn photoshop or CS2 (the 2 programs I have).

What can be done to improve these next time?

1)

Wow! I miss my dog so much (;_

Anyway, you've overcooked it with either the exposure or PP. See the dog's white areas on their muzzles? There's no detail there at all. Maybe you could re-shoot with less exposure? Get in closer too so your metering system has less chance of getting messed up with the snow...

Maybe some fill-flash?

Experiment and have some fun!

Such beautiful dogs......
"sniff, sniff"

The muzzles are blown out because the bulk of the image is fairly dark and your meter wants to make the dark fur and dark railroad ties 18% grey. So, the white muzzles get over exposed...

You Could:
- Move in close to meter just on the muzzles and use that meter reading + 1/2 stop in Manual Mode
- Spot Meter on the muzzles (and open up 1/2 stop so everything else doesn't go black)
- Average Meter the scene and dial in a bit of negative exposure compensation to hold the overall level down some to avoid blowing out the muzzles.