Vintage Assem-dog (Photography Lesson)

It's aperture priority week in the Get Out of Auto Mode photography class I'm taking.  For my model, I'm using my Vintage Assem-dog.  He's an altered dog model (originally purchased on Dick Blick), which I created as part of an assemblage class I taught.  All photos are pretty much straight out of the camera (no brightening, sharpening, color enhancing, etc.), although I did crop them a bit.  The picture above was my favorite of the session, and I took it with my 50mm prime lens with the aperture set to 2.8.  This gave me enough blur in both the background and the dog to make an interesting shot.
I took two good photos at a higher f-stop and got crisper images, which I might use if I was trying to use the photo on an etsy page or as a clear illustration of the project.  The first one is at f5.6 and the second one is at f10:

The lowest fstop I can get with my 50 mm lens is 1.8, and I got this nice fade-away:

When I tried to get closer and still use a low fstop, the lowest I could get my f-stop down to was f5; I got this shot I liked:

One of the biggest things I learned was that, if I want to do this type of photography (not sure I do), the lens makes a huge difference!  My regular kit lens only goes down to f4.2 (focal length was 75), and here's the best shot I got with it:

I also played with the aperture setting using my telephoto lens. While I was able to get closer to the model, the lowest I could get my fstop and still focus was 5.3. The focal length was 160 (my telephoto goes to 200).  Here's my best shot:

I do like how the background went all dark!


Do you have any favorites of the photos above?  Are you a fan of fade-away, blurred art photos or do you prefer crisp all over?  I hope to do this exercise again taking photos of people  instead of my trusty assem-dog.  And I will probably use what I learned to photograph my other assemblage animals (one more dog and two cats).