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"FROLLEIN!"-How dogs see

Thomas Stelzmann decides to do an experiment and photographically depict the world from a dog's point of view. He puts himself in "Frollein's" place, an old lady dog, and explains his technical approach. See the world from 25 cm above your eyes. "Frollein!"
"FROLLEIN, enough is enough, come on!"
"Listen to me, Frollein!"

No.
Frollein doesn't listen.
Frollein is a presumably female, much too fat mongrel of about 7.38 different dog breeds. Her owner is about 75 - 80 years old, pushes a squeaky walker in front of her and has a voice that could cut glass. She knows absolutely nothing about dogs. She talks in complicated sentences to the animal, which does nothing at all in response to the constant chatter ......
But the old lady is probably alone and Frollein is her only company, which is just as well. At some point, Frollein wobbles two meters ahead on the leash and pees on the ground next to a lamppost.
I don't have a dog myself and don't want one because I imagine what life is like for dogs in the city. In an environment that they can't choose.
Most dogs don't even have their heads at knee height. What is it like down there? How do they experience their day at the height of exhaust pipes, car tires, tree slices, feet darting past, bicycle wheels?

I decide to try an experiment.
No no, I'm not going to crawl on my belly on the sidewalks through our beautiful city, you'd like that! I'm a photographer and I'm going to try to use a camera to simulate the perspective of a dog, at least very roughly. Not that of a big dog, but that of.... well, just "Frollein".
First of all, I do some research on the net about dogs' eyesight.
"Dogs have poor eyesight", I once heard.
That's true on the one hand, but it's not true on the other.
We humans perceive the three primary colors red, green and blue via three different receptors in our eyes, each in around 200 shades. Dogs see things differently, in the truest sense of the word. They see red as yellow, and green is gray for them, they lack the receptor for green. However, they can see colors such as blue or violet, and they can see them very well and more than we can. The pictures therefore tend to have a blue and violet cast. This is important for image processing later on, because my camera doesn't see canine, but RGB. Presumably yours does too.

The image section is also important.
Dogs with an elongated head (dachshunds, greyhounds) tend to have their eyes on the side of their head and therefore have a large field of vision, up to 240 degrees. However, this is not so much a characteristic of the respective eye, but more a performance of the dog's brain, which combines the two fields of vision of the eyes into a common image.
At least I assume that's what it does.
Of course, this pushes me to the limits of my photographic equipment.
You can forget about photographing such an enormous field of view with just one "shot". There are fisheye lenses that cover a field of view of around 180?.

However, only a small area of the image sensor is used, and the image is distorted and vignetted as if you were looking through a roll of toilet paper at a spherical mirror. I don't know how a dog sees this, but I can't imagine that Mother Nature designed it that way. How is Frollein supposed to recognize her owner like that...? I had to find another solution, so I had to take lots of pictures and put them together on the computer. That way I can keep the distortion within limits and expand the image area. My aim has to be a kind of dog's-eye panorama.
There are other differences between the way dogs and humans see. Large
dogs can only see about six meters further, smaller ones even less. What comes behind them is obviously blurred for them. So I have to adjust the focus range manually, let's say to three to four meters. The last peculiarity is the detection of movement. Dogs see moving objects in focus, while stationary objects are blurred and out of focus.
For the sake of simplicity, I'll assume Frollein.
Frollein often just stands around and will therefore see almost everything blurred.

Now that it was clear what needed to be done, I got down to the equipment. I use my mirrorless Fujifilm X-E2 and the really excellent Fujifilm AF 4.0/10-24 R OIS.
The focus of the lens is set so that the image is sharp at around three to four meters. But that doesn't mean setting the manual focus to four meters! I would like to have a clear blur from about four meters. So I focus manually at a distance of about two meters and let the sharpness run out towards the back.
Yes, I think it looks very doggy.
I switch off the image stabilizer to be on the safe side, because I don't want the camera to vibrate due to the control movements and the images to be blurred despite the tripod.

Now to the viewing height. I thought an extensive measurement campaign on the "working height of the visual organs of small dogs" was exaggerated and took the liberty of making an estimate.
The head height of my virtual dog should be around 22 - 25 cm, pi times thumb, a "Frolleinesque" height.

To do this, I need a different tripod to the two I have. They also allow me to work close to the ground, but only by spreading the tripod legs, which would then inevitably protrude into the picture. I already have to work around with Photoshop in the pictures anyway, but even more retouching would increase the effort for this attempt disproportionately.

My choice fell on the "Rollei Compact Traveler Mini M1". This mini tripod is a kind of always-on helper for small cameras, although it can supposedly carry 25 kg. I decided not to try it out. It's 15cm tall when folded up, with a pleasant amount of metal. Unfortunately, the ball head supplied only has a single fixation for the ball and you can't use the panorama function separately. In other words, if I want to pan, the entire alignment of the camera changes. I don't ask who comes up with these things, but simply replace the original head with my Manfrotto head, which has a separate panorama axis. There you go, it works! Now I can mount the camera at a height of approx. 22 cm and swivel the dog head easily.

For the first time on the  X-E2 I miss a flip-up monitor that can be rotated in all directions, this camera is not made for working close to the ground.
However, the difficulties are limited. After a few test pictures in the nearby Hanielpark, I go on a tour and observe dogs and their people. I wait until they have gone and take pictures at the places where the dog has walked or stood; I record what it must have seen. I always take about eight to 10 pictures, the angles are easy to estimate, I don't miss the flip-up display at all and pan blindly. People look at me funny...

As the individual images are to be combined later, an overlap at the edges of the image is a must. If the image content changes in this area, for example because a child runs into the image, the program has even more difficulties because the child is missing in the next image. Fortunately, I can take my time and wait for the "clear path". People are looking funny again.

Typical street scenes such as peed-on lampposts and car tires are given to me by real dogs, while I make up other environments such as stairwells in parking garages. I also don't leave out the boring scene under the tables of a street caf? that a dog has to look at while the person "up there" drinks coffee for hours. Now you can imagine how the dog must feel. It's boring...

Photoshop CC's Photomerge function does the stitching. It doesn't always work smoothly. Sometimes artefacts occur due to overlaps that are too tight or pans that are not quite horizontal, which have to be removed.
Later, I turn my attention to the colors.
Green should become grey, red becomes yellow, the whole picture is slightly bluish and purple. You have to make several passes.
In the end, there are five scenes that can be considered a good approximation.

I am fully aware that my approach was often simplistic, that I made assumptions and estimates. This has not become a doctoral thesis in biology.

For once, photography is not used here as a tool to capture moments. It is a kind of translation aid between the "canine" and human perspective, and the nice thing is that anyone can do such photographic experiments relatively easily, you just have to be curious and think about how to go about it.

In this case, photography helps us to understand a little about how dogs have to live in our urban world, and it reinforces my opinion that there is no way I would want to expose a dog to this world, at least not in a city. "Down there" there is often a crazy hustle and bustle, it smells, it stinks... Not exactly uplifting. I'd rather have a dog's life in the countryside, sorry: in the gray.

I'm finishing this little photographic experiment and have learned a lot about the way dogs see things with the help of photography.

Wait, I hear something...what is that...?....quiet.... "Frollein...are you coming soon?!?!?" Oh my goodness, the acoustic glass saw!
I really need to get away, see ya...!


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