Pet Pawtraits!

After looking out at a beautiful day from the windows at work, I decided that when I get home tonight I will shoot some pet portraits. In theory this sounds easy, but in practise it's quite difficult. I found out that you have to be prepared for sudden movements, stubborn animal behaviour, and not tempting the animal that much to pose, that you are left with a licked all over lens.

Just so happens, that Sasha, my dog, is terrible with all these things. To be a wildlife photographer, patience is key, but photographin pets can be more.... Frustrating!

Great fun though. Sasha had me rolling into all different positions, high and low, near and far. I decided to shoot with my prime lens, 50mm, and chose (a) narrow aperture/s between f/1.8 and f/4. Shooting with low aperture numbers enables you to bring out detail, and really isolates your subject to capture something specific, like a facial expression for example (the same rules apply when shooting people really, portraits require background blur for subject isolation, debatably).

Next time I do this, I will give it a whole morning or afternoon, and hope for a sunny day, unless you want to shoot them indoors. Natural light on portraits always looks better, in my opinion anyway...

As you can see from the top picture, not every shot I took was glamorous.

The whole point is, without question, to capture your pet's personality. With a bit of leaping, persuading and imploring, it should be easier said than done. Getting there is the whole fun though!

Photograph your pet tonight, and see how you get on!

Here is mum giving Sasha a brush, and she appears to either not like it, or jeering at me behind the camera.

Here are some of the pics.

You can get a nice natural look, by just pointing the camera, focusing, and waiting for them to look down the barrell of the camera. Unfortunately, Sasha here looks a bit gormless, and uninspired by my direction.

 I ran up the garden for this one, and then got into position for her run down to her favourite spot in the garden. A fast shutter speed of 1/1500 made sure I captured her quick movement without any motion blur.

Same again here, shame she wasn't looking the other way!

This was shot landscape, but I tilted it portrait for a more abstract look. I like the shadow and highlight ratio in this one.

 Scooby-doo impression.

This is what I had to deal with for almost 10 minutes. A dog that's more interested on whats the other side of the fence. I tried to go the other side to capture her expression, but was shooting straight into the sun and had a very hazy effect.

 Once again, unimpressed.

 A little more impressed, not much though.











A nice natural indoor shot.
Slightly out of shot was a biscuit that held her to sitting ransom. That didn't last long!

I feel some of these in portrait have potential, requires getting down on your hands and knees though!




Going....









Going.....











Gone.

 Daft as a brush.

See what a diva my model was? Try it - hopefully yours will be better behaved!