Pet portraits - tips for good photography

Photographing animals has given me a lot of pleasure recently. I have been taking a lot of pictures of dogs and have been very lucky that the recent ones have all been placid and well behaved, this does make everything much easier. It is the same for animals as it is or people, always try to get the eyes in focus. Remember to take lots of pictures, there is less posing control so capturing the right tilt to the dogs head is tricky. Try moving the dogs own ball or toy above your own head to get the dog to track it, this means the best picture will almost certainly be captured in a series of images. This does mean you may have to take the picture one handed though!

This lovely dog has epilepsy, so no flash photography. This meant outside shooting and the use of reflectors to bounce the light in the right way.

One way I got these three dogs to sit close together was to loop one dogs lead through the collars of the other two. It did not take too much work in Photoshop to remove any exposed pieces of the lead.

As with photographing children, get down low. A lowered perspective gives a much better and more natural composition, a very different image of your pet than the one usually taken from eye level looking down.