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Asked about livestock photography, I immediately thought of three important considerations:
1. Lighting
2. Lighting
3. LightingThere are other factors, too, but really, lighting is probably the biggest one. I took this photo of Short Ribs back in October of 2014. I still consider it one of my best calf photos, mainly because of the lighting. Most people think of farms/farm animals under “golden hour” lighting. Your best chance is to get out there then.
But “livestock” is a big term. What kind of animals are you shooting? If you’re shooting cattle, especially if you’re photographing bulls (and there certainly is a need for better bull photographers: the AI catalogues are full of lousy pictures!), you won’t want the 50mm’ buddingphotographer recommended for puppies! But poultry are often a bit curious about photographers, so a shorter lens might be needed for that.
All our animals are fairly tame, so we can take them out on the lawn for photo sessions. If you can do that, have a helper along to catch runaways! Or we get creative and set up an old bathtub outdoors to get duckling swimming. If your livestock is a little shy, sometimes you can draw them by imitating their calls. I had to “quack” to get this photo.
If you can’t take them out, just opening the door of the cage makes for a better photo than shooting through wire (see attachement 1). Just be ready to jump up and shoo the animals back if they try to get out!
The main thing I would say, other than lighting, is keep the photos simple. Get rid of as much clutter as possible. The animal itself is generally interesting enough without adding other elements. If you allow other things in, keep it simple. I’ve attached a picture of our current calf, Coffee Crisp. There is actually a calf hutch behind him, but I cut it out.
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Very profound. Thank you for the tips and examples! You do have lots of “livestock” experience I didn’t know about.
I had a nice reply all written up, and it got lost! 🙁 (Lenspiration logged me out and didn’t tell me till I hit “Submit”) 🙁
Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography. – George Eastman
I think George Eastman would have agreed with your 3 main points. 🙂 He was the guy who “invented” photography for the common people. He came up with a camera and film that could be used easily, and the film processed cheaply. You may have heard of his company, KODAK.
If you’re shooting cattle, especially if you’re photographing bulls … you won’t want the 50mm’ buddingphotographer recommended for puppies!
Ok, so what lens do you recommend? 🙂
A lot of your points seem to be similar to my tips for puppy photography! I think there must be quite a few similarities. 🙂 (I guess I didn’t emphasize light much though, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.)
And now for the technical side of things. 🙂
Have you ever considered embedding photos in your posts, so that people can see what picture you’re referring to?
This is what I mean: (I made it small on purpose, usually it will fill the width of the page.)
To do that, just click on the
imgbutton when you’re creating a reply/topic, and put the link to the picture in the little dialog box that pops up. If you want, you can make the image smaller as I did above, so that it doesn’t take so much room in your post. To do that, just add this bit of HTML inside the<img/>tag like this:<img src="https://files.lenspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/14182906/20141003_ELF_3674.jpg?17ee50" alt="" width="300" height="auto" />(The part that I added was: width=”300″ height=”auto”) You can change the “300” to any width that you want, it’s a measure of how many pixels across it is.If you want people to be able to click on the picture to open it up large, you can do that too! Just highlight/select the whole
<img src="https://files.lenspiration.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/14182906/20141003_ELF_3674.jpg?17ee50" alt="" width="300" height="auto" />tag, and click on the “link” button. Paste the link to the photo in the “URL” section, and leave the “Link Text” as it is.The only problem with this method is if you are creating a new post, but haven’t uploaded the photo that you want to embed yet! In that case, I write all my text, then attach the photos that I want to embed and “Submit”. Once it’s submitted, I edit the post, and add in the embed code using the newly uploaded picture link.
Alternatively, you can use Flickr to host your photos, that way you don’t have to jump through Lenspiration’s hoops. 🙂
Ok, so what lens do you recommend?
Well, that depends how afraid you are of the animal, or how good you think you are at getting out the way should it turn on you! I’m not terribly afraid of bulls, but then I’ve never met a really nasty one either. Our 70-200mm works just fine for me. For smaller animals I have used my 18-55mm or my dad’s 60′. The prime is really nice for the lower f-stop, but if the animal keeps moving a lot, sometimes chasing it with a zoom is more convenient than using your feet. I would not recommend going all the way down to 18mm, though, unless you’re doing a “herd shot” from a distance. Distorted animals aren’t beautiful.
Have you ever considered embedding photos in your posts, so that people can see what picture you’re referring to?
YES! Absolutely! I tried to figure out how you did it, but ran out of time. I only got far enough to see that you used Flicker with which we don’t have an account. It crossed my mind that perhaps I could make use of Google+, but I haven’t have opportunity to attempt it. And then I thought maybe I’d just ask… But you answered my question before I did! Thank you so much!
So here is my attempt:
I agree, livestock photography is very much like puppy photography, except that your subjects are often quite a bit larger and usually less friendly. Our ducks were really wild despite being around people all their lives. I put them in an old bathtub tipped so they couldn’t escape from the far side while I positioned myself with a 60′ at the other end.
The chicks on the other hand thought I was the safest object around and kept running to me!
And our cows are really friendly!
buddingphotographer recommended shooting in the shade with puppies. I would say the same with livestock only if you really can’t get out early in the morning (or evening). You don’t want the blotchy look of mingled sun and shade, but the absolute best is the golden hour. I can’t emphasise that enough.
And get yourself at the right angle to the sun! Here are two photos I took within minutes of each other, without moving my feet.
Another day the sun was getting rather high, but I took a look at the shadows and lined myself up to get this shot:
Another minor difference between puppies and livestock. Dogs look great in human settings, human-looking props, whereas livestock “usually” aren’t pets. Getting as natural a setting is often the best enhancement.
Oh, and always expect to get a few odd shots… 🙂
- This reply was modified 54 years, 11 months ago by .
Here is my new attempt. I don’t know how to alter an existing post, so I’ll copy the other one here.
I agree, livestock photography is very much like puppy photography, except that your subjects are often quite a bit larger and usually less friendly. Our ducks were really wild despite being around people all their lives. I put them in an old bathtub tipped so they couldn’t escape from the far side while I positioned myself with a 60′ at the other end.
The chicks on the other hand thought I was the safest object around and kept running to me!
And our cows are really friendly!
Buddingphotographer recommended shooting in the shade with puppies. I would say the same with livestock only if you really can’t get out early in the morning (or in the evening). You don’t want the blotchy look of mingled sun and shade, but the absolute best is the golden hour. I can’t emphasise that enough.And get yourself at the right angle to the sun! Here are two photos I took within minutes of each other, without moving my feet.
Another day the sun was getting rather high, but I took a look at the shadows and lined myself up to get this shot:
Another minor difference between puppies and livestock. Dogs look great in human settings, human-looking props, whereas livestock “usually” aren’t pets. Getting as natural a setting is often the best enhancement.
Oh, and always expect to get a few funny shots… 🙂
Yeah! I think it worked! Thanks for your help, buddingphotographer!
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Wow! Very nice pictures Frazer Family, I really enjoyed them. Keep up the great livestock photography!
Great! That’s much more intuitive. 🙂
I noticed however, that the page took a long time to load… That’s the reason I host with Flickr. When you upload a photo to Flickr, it keeps your original intact, but it also makes resized copies of it at common sizes like 800×600, 1024×678, 1600 etc… When I want to embed a photo here on Lenspiration, I can choose the size I want to embed, and it loads much faster because it’s a resized and compressed. If people want to see a higher res. version of the photo, they can just click on the photo, and load it in Flickr, where they can zoom in.
When you “resize” your embedded photo in Lenspiration by editing the
widthandheightsettings in the HTML, that doesn’t actually resize the pictures, it merely tells the browser to scale them to a certain size. So when I load this page, the browser is having to download a full-sized photo, just to display a scaled down thumbnail of it.Maybe I’ll have to contact James’s web designer to see if something like that can be implemented natively on Lenspiration, so we don’t have to use a 3rd party option. I know that WordPress can automatically resize uploads, so I would imagine that it’s possible. Another handy feature would be the option to upload pictures before submitting the post, sot that you can get the URL to embed the photo with.
Hmm… yes it isn’t fast. I should look into Flickr. Would it work from Google+? I’d probably need to have the photos share publicly, right?
That would be neat if it were possible to have that option implemented natively on Lenspiration. I know my brother talked with James’ web designer about ways to speed up the site, but I don’t know what all they discussed.
This has been a fun thread to follow!
Here is my new attempt. I don’t know how to alter an existing post
I believe you can only alter an existing post for a short time immediately after it has been posted. There should be a little “Edit” option on the top bar of your reply. Correct me if I’m wrong!
You should be able to use Google+ . . . here’s a test using a URL from Google Photos without necessarily making the picture public.
Hmm. I guess it didn’t work. Here’s another test, linking to a “random” picture shared with me privately on Google+.
And that didn’t work either. So, what about this. I right clicked on the same image, chose “Open image in new tab”, and copied the URL to insert the following:
Well, nothing seems to have happened. Since that didn’t work, let me try a Publicly shared image. (Same thing, right clicked, chose “Open image in new tab”, and copied the URL:
Ah, yes! It worked! This is good stuff to know. It doesn’t look like I have the normal options for changing image size though.
CONCLUSION: You can use Google+ images if they are Public.- This reply was modified 54 years, 11 months ago by .
Doesn’t work for me either… 🙁 I’m not seeing any pictures.
To embed a photo, you must use a link that points to a
.jpgfile. None of the links that you tried, @jamesstaddon actually point to a.jpgfile, they’re all dynamic URLs. If I get time a little later, I’ll try to find out what the actual jpg file links are and see if I can make them work. However, like you said, you don’t get file resize options, so that’s still not an ideal solution. Plus, I like the images to be hosted on Lenspiration so that they’re more likely to work after a long period of time. I’ve seen countless Flickr/Photobucket/Google+ photos embedded in forums that had an “Error not found” symbol because someone moved the photo or deleted it, and didn’t realize that it affected their forum post.
@JamesStaddon said:I believe you can only alter an existing post for a short time immediately after it has been posted. There should be a little “Edit” option on the top bar of your reply. Correct me if I’m wrong!
Yep, you can edit for a short time period, and then the Edit button goes away… But that doesn’t mean that you can’t edit your post any more. 🙂 I found out a little URL trick that lets me edit it any time that I want. Not long ago I edited a post that I made several months ago, and it worked! 🙂
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