Pet Photography

After being hired by a studio which also produces Pet Photography I decided to start practicing on working with animals, finding poses and lighting tricks to help me when I got into the studio so that I was not thrown off and unprepared.

I first started practicing more seriously with my own pets, my dog is not currently the best trained and he was not a cooperative subject. I managed to get a few photographs of him and even managed to train him to wear a hat in order to take some of him dressed up.

I have taken many photographs of my dog but taking them in this shoot with the intention of making them look like a studio shoot was much harder than I first thought. I chose a plain wall in my house and used a speedlite on the background and another in front of the dog.  At first I could not get the lighting right but after playing with the flashes I managed to get them to both connect to each other; the only problem with using these speedlites was that I did not know how to change the standby time so every two minutes it was going into standby which meant many of my shots were just black as the flashes had not fired.

These are two of the photographs from the shoot, the first one is of Levii in his hat, this was taken after many shots and a few different hats, I wanted to experiment with different styles so I took the second shot to make it look more artistic and I wanted to be able to isolate Levii from the background as I find backgrounds distracting.