Home › Forums › Photography Q&A › 12 Tips for Puppy Photography
- This topic has 54 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 7 years ago by Ezra Morley.
-
AuthorPosts
-
July 5, 2016 at 3:57 pm #17904Hannah MooreParticipant
I should try that. Only once, I brought my flash out and tried it on a few things but that didn’t go very well, and I wasn’t in the mood to practice with the flash. So… I will try to practice with that soon!! Thanks! 🙂
July 6, 2016 at 11:13 am #17909Ezra MorleyModeratorVery cute pictures! The puppies and the fence seem almost inseparable, don’t they? 🙂
Good tip on the fill-flash, @dfrazer! Just try to keep the flash turned down low. The key is “fill” not flood. You don’t want it to be very obvious that a flash was used. Just enough to lighten the shadows and give a bit of a catch-light should be all you need.
Yes, @buddingphotographer, I should learn about Lightroom, but the only way I can, is to buy it first. But before I do that, I would like to get a better lens.
Good idea, I better lens will do more to improve your pictures than post-processing software. However, I’m sure your sister would let you use her copy of Lightroom for some quick edits if you need to. 🙂
Of course, there are always free options as well. FastStone Image Viewer has some editing tools for JPG files. If you need something a little more involved than that, there’s the free RAWTherapee. (I just made a 30 minute tutorial on the basics of RAWTherapee, if you need some help getting started with it.) Don’t forget about GIMP either, it can do just about anything you can throw at it! 🙂
July 6, 2016 at 3:02 pm #17915Frazer FamilyParticipantOK. Here are the kittens! 🙂 They’re three weeks old now and starting to crawl around a bit. Buddingphotographer, you mentioned that black animals are hard to expose correctly, and I totally agree! Do you have any tips for doing that? Five of our six kittens are black… 🙁
July 6, 2016 at 5:50 pm #17923Ezra MorleyModeratorVery cute! I like the second picture better. Is that kitten supposed to be black too? 🙂
I don’t have a whole lot tips, but I guess I can try to help!
Little black animals are hard to auto-focus on; there’s not much contrast, so the camera has a hard time. I don’t know much to tell you about how to fix it, except to make sure you’re photographing in plenty of light! If there’s a catchlight in the eyes, you might be able to focus on that. 🙂
As for exposure, that’s a bit complicated as well! Definitely don’t use “Spot” metering mode, set it to “Matrix”. If you’re using Spot, and point it at a dark object, it will try to brighten it up to 18% grey, or whatever your camera meter thinks is optimal. That will severely over-expose your picture. Matrix will look at the whole picture and try to make it an even exposure. If your black animal fills the frame, then even Matrix will probably over-expose, so you might end up needing to use Exposure Compensation to darken the photo a little.
I generally get somewhat over-exposed pictures anyway, which I then import into Lightroom, and use the Exposure and Black sliders to make the blacks in the picture look black, not grey. (Or is it “gray”?) You can do something very similar with RAWTherapee.
(I did a quick edit to your picture here, as the coloring seemed to be just a little bit on the purplish side. I changed the color temperature to be a little warmer, and adjusted the tint toward the green side to get rid of the purplish cast. I also did a little curve to try to make the blacks look a little blacker).
July 8, 2016 at 7:46 pm #17932Frazer FamilyParticipantOh, yes, of course! I can slide the blacks down! I was going on automatic and watching my histogram: not quite clipping in the blacks or the whites. But if there is a black cat in the pictures, of course the blacks should be clipped! 🙂 (Why didn’t I think of that? 🙂 )
I’ll have to try again using EC to darken the photo. I was already using Matrix metering mode. But now that I understand why I have trouble, I may be able to get some better pictures.
I like the second one better too. I got more creative as I went along (and after I put some of the kittens back – six all at once was too many).
(Or is it “gray”?)
It’s “grey” unless you’re American. From the Oxford English Dictionary: grey (US gray); adjective (greyer, greyest; grayer grayest) 1. of a colour intermediate between black and white, as of ashes or lead. My spell check is underlining “gray.” And yes, the second kitten is grey. 🙂 She’s the easiest to photograph.
July 8, 2016 at 8:56 pm #17933Ezra MorleyModeratorI like the second one better too. I got more creative as I went along (and after I put some of the kittens back – six all at once was too many).
I guess! We learned that with puppies, you can’t have any kittens, dogs, cats, birds, or anything else around, or your subject will inevitably be distracted beyond it’s point of endurance. 🙂
It’s “grey” unless you’re American. From the Oxford English Dictionary: grey (US gray); adjective (greyer, greyest; grayer grayest) 1. of a colour intermediate between black and white, as of ashes or lead. My spell check is underlining “gray.” And yes, the second kitten is grey. 🙂 She’s the easiest to photograph.
That’s funny! I’m from the US, but I usually spell it “grey”. 🙂
July 8, 2016 at 9:00 pm #17934Ezra MorleyModeratorI just looked closely at the “gray” kitten, and it looks like you’ve got some motion blur. 🙁 Looks like you’ll need to raise your shutter speed or turn on VR. 🙂
July 18, 2016 at 4:02 pm #18080Frazer FamilyParticipantI haven’t had opportunity to shoot more of the black kittens, but I did take out the friendly grey one the other day. And I tried to make sure VR was on!
That’s funny! I’m from the US, but I usually spell it “grey”. 🙂
Most Americans have some British heritage. That’s probably where you got the spelling. 🙂
July 20, 2016 at 8:24 pm #18140Hannah MooreParticipantI love the cute little kitten look!! When I got my cat Ashley, I was able to be the first to pick out of the litter of six, because they were my brothers kittens! 🙂 I posted a picture of her when she was younger and now older!!
I never got the pictures of the puppies with the off camera flash. Oh well! I took pictures of most of the puppy customers, and they might post some on the blog. For right now, http://www.windyknollgoldens.com/ are taking the time to cuddle their new little one. They do have some pictures on the blog of her though!! They will pick up on the blog soon.July 27, 2016 at 11:33 am #18270Frazer FamilyParticipantAnyone want a kitten? 🙂 My sister and I took some time this morning to take pictures of the black kittens so we could put up an ad to give them away.
On the whole, I was pretty pleased with the results. Thanks, buddingphotographer, for the suggestion of using the AE-L for black animals. It sure helped!
August 4, 2016 at 9:34 am #18532James StaddonKeymasterJust got caught up on this thread . . . great pictures of the kittens!
October 1, 2016 at 4:37 pm #19317Ezra MorleyModeratorOctober 1, 2016 at 4:50 pm #19320Ezra MorleyModeratorOctober 2, 2016 at 1:02 pm #19329Hannah MooreParticipantHow cute! Makes you want to buy that knew little puppy!
March 28, 2017 at 7:30 pm #22499James StaddonKeymasterYou’ve got a beautiful collection here, @buddingphotographer. You should put together an online collection somewhere and go into the business of photographing pets. 🙂
-
AuthorPosts
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.