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Technique vs Artistic Creativity in Photography – How Important is it to Find a Balance?

12 Jan

The post Technique vs Artistic Creativity in Photography – How Important is it to Find a Balance? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.

Discussion about technique vs artistic creativity in photographic circles can cause tensions. Much of what’s focused on when learning photography is camera technique. Creative aspects are often left out, even after you’ve picked up some camera skills.

Developing a balanced approach to photography is important. If you’re content to just document what’s in front of you, don’t worry about it. You need to know how to operate your camera competently to be creative with it. Camera technique vs artistic creativity is a matter of engaging both brain hemispheres.

Left brain vs right brain functions

It’s said that the left hemisphere of our brain is more academic and logical. The right hemisphere is more imaginative and artistic. Technique vs artistic creativity seems to separate somewhat in our thinking.

Learning to work with a camera well requires a good understanding of its basic functions. Controlling the amount of light entering your camera is essential to master. Of course, you can leave this left brain function to the camera’s artificial intelligence (AI). This happens when you use any of its auto or semi-auto modes.

Relying on the camera’s AI takes away some of the technical challenges in camera use. It also inhibits the full expression of the right brain hemisphere’s artistic creativity. When your camera chooses the exposure setting, you relinquish much of your creative expression.

Photography means ‘drawing or painting with light’

Camera’s don’t take fabulous photographs, fabulous photographers do. Just as an artist’s brush doesn’t make a beautiful painting on its own, a camera is only as creative as the person using it.

The word ‘photography’ comes from the Greek language. It means ‘drawing or painting with light’.

The amount of light entering your camera affects the way your ‘digital canvas’ will appear. Understanding how the camera captures light requires left brain function. Leaving the camera to determine the ‘right’ amount of light negates much of the function of the right brain in creative photography.

If you can’t manage your exposure well it doesn’t matter how good your composition or timing is, your photos will lack creativity. Painting with light requires a good deal of creative decision making.

Master your camera

When you have mastered your camera, you’re in a stronger position to balance technique vs artistic creativity. Learning how to control the essential functions of your camera frees you up. Then you can concentrate more on the creative aspects of taking photos.

Frequent camera use and study will give you the ability to use your camera fluidly. The more you learn and practice with your camera, the less you will have to concentrate on it.

It can be like learning to touch type or drive a manual-shift car. At first, these are difficult and require a lot of concentration. Plenty of mistakes happen. Spelling mistakes happen. The car will bunny hop and stall. But, with a dedication to learning, the errors become minimized. You can begin to focus your attention on other things. You no longer have to look at where you are placing your fingers on the keyboard. Driving becomes smooth and you can enjoy the scenery.

Camera use is no different.

Once you study and practice enough you will free up your mind to concentrate on the creative aspects of photography. The technical actions required to take photos will consume less of your attention.

Release your creative expression

Once you’re comfortable controlling your camera, you can be more creative with it. When you understand how it captures images, you’ll be able to manage the settings artistically. Knowing how the sensor responds to light will give you the ability to control it with more innovative expression.

Leaving the exposure up to the camera’s AI will most often result in rather bland results. Your photos will look like everyone else’s who uses and auto mode. This is because the AI is not creative. It’s all algorithm-based and calibrated in a technical lab.

Technique vs Artistic Creativity in Photography – How Important is it to Find a Balance?

Your camera does a pretty good job of exposing your photos. It aims to provide an even exposure, not blowing out highlights or diminishing shadow detail. This does not, however, often make the most expressive exposures.

Manually exposing a photograph well adds depth and feeling to the picture. Scene modes on some cameras will include options for portraits, landscapes, action, and the likes. I have never come across a camera that offers automatic modes to create dramatic, happy or somber photographs. Controlling your camera manually allows you to make creative choices.

Being in control of your exposure allows you to make choices based on what your main subject is. Your camera does not know what it is. Some AI systems in cameras will guess what you are photographing and return exposure results on this presumption.

You will know exactly the nature of your composition and, when you have some understanding of light, you’ll expose it the way you want it to look.

Push beyond what’s considered correct

Technique vs artistic creativity teaching is often dominated by those whose aim is to take technically correct photos. Photos that don’t fit in the technically correct ‘box’ are scorned.

For creative photographers, ‘correct’ photos are usually perceived as dull, no matter what the subject. Whether a particular composition rule applies does not matter to them. If the whole image is not evenly exposed the photo is still acceptable.

I’ve met far too many photographers who think their photos must reach certain technical standards to be any good. This is what they focus on, and often, their photos lack creative expression.

Knowing how to manage your camera settings well is vital to creative photograph. The technique is very important, but the rules are not.

Conclusion

Aim to use your camera without consciously thinking about it – much the same way you’ll drive a manual shift car after enough practice.

Instead of thinking about your shutter speed and aperture settings, focus on how you are feeling. What do you want to express in the photographs you are taking? Be present within the moment and relate more to your subject than to your camera. Then you will find the balance between technical vs artistic creativity.

Share your thoughts on this in the comments below.

The post Technique vs Artistic Creativity in Photography – How Important is it to Find a Balance? appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.

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A Simple Technique to Put the Pizzazz Back Into Your Photos

14 Dec

The post A Simple Technique to Put the Pizzazz Back Into Your Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Darren Rowse.

Kent DuFault’s Complete Guide to Long Exposure Photography

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The post A Simple Technique to Put the Pizzazz Back Into Your Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Darren Rowse.

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How to Turn a Photography Technique into a Series

05 Feb

The post How to Turn a Photography Technique into a Series appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Bond.

Photography is a truly diverse art form. There are so many ways you can express yourself through a photograph. The photos you take are often a reflection of your personality, and it’s your personality which leads you towards your photographic style. There are a number of photography techniques you can learn to express this style. In this article, you’ll learn how to go beyond a few photos using a particular technique, and find out how you can turn this into a series of photos. So read on and find out how you can boost your creativity, by using one technique to create a photographic series.

Look to take as many interesting photos as you can, with your chosen photo technique.

Choose the photography technique for your series

With so many photography techniques to choose from, it can be tricky to home in on just one. Perhaps you already have some go-to techniques you regularly employ? If so, it’s a good idea to choose one of these. On the other hand, perhaps there is a new technique you’d like to try, and you have a raft of creative ideas to go with it. If you need a little help, below are some ideas that lend themselves to making a series.

Light painting – A genre with a massive amount of potential, and creativity is almost endless. Will you try your hand at kinetic light painting? How about using a programmable LED light stick?
Crystal ball photography – Explore the world through a glass ball, and discover that your lens is not the only optic you can use in your photography.
Minimalism – Photography is the art of subtraction, and the appeal of minimalism is always there. Why not turn this into a series?
Silhouettes – An easy photography technique to master is silhouettes. Get down low to the ground, and photograph against the light! You’ll need a strong compelling shape to aim at though.
Low-key light – A series of portrait photos always looks nice, and using low-key light is a great photography technique to produce them. Why stop at portraits though? There is a whole world of still life to work with.
Shadows – Like silhouettes, shadows can be an interesting subject matter. Look to photograph early morning, or late evening when the length of shadow is long.
Headshots – A series of portrait photos is a great idea, and if you travel it’s a great chance to show the diversity of the world. In this case, the overall theme is the composition of a headshot, but within that, there is huge potential to be creative.

Creating a story through a sequence of photos works well. In this case, the concepts of water, earth, and fire are displayed.

Have a narrative

Having a photograph technique that is consistent throughout your series is great. However, thinking of an overall narrative to describe your work makes it that much stronger. Think about how you can describe your technique. If your technique is on light painting, you could be exploring dynamism, the future, or energy flows. The crystal ball might allow you to explore themes like dreams, the world in a globe or environmentalism. Those themes can be used to form a title for your body of work. Now you’re not just working to a photography technique, but also to a creative concept. It’s this creative concept that can push you to produce more work in the photography genre you’re exploring.

In this photo, a portrait photo has been taken, but within the ball is a landscape image.

Combine techniques

Now, of course, there is no reason you shouldn’t combine techniques. It’s a great way to expand your series of work. You can use many of the techniques listed earlier in this article in combination. In fact, there are lots of techniques not listed here that you could also incorporate, such as contrast. The crystal ball is just one example of a technique that you can combine with others. Below you can see a few ideas for how you can combine techniques with a crystal ball.

Light painting – Light paint around the crystal ball gives it a more mystical feel.
Headshot – Use the crystal ball as a prop for your portrait photography.
Minimalism – Use the ball as a focal point in your image, and make the rest of the image as minimal as possible.

This photo displays both refraction photography and light painting.

Look to themes

A popular type of photography is to photograph the same scene but at different times of the year. In this way, you can use the seasons as your theme, and repeat the composition and technique you’re using. That means you’ll get four great photos, and you’ll have a mini-series within your overall set of photos. There are lots of ways you can apply this. Below are a few ideas that you may use to expand your work.

The seasons – Look to produce images that show spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They don’t have to be taken from the same location, but repetition does create a stronger feel to the set.
Elements – Can you use your technique to portray earth, fire, water, and air? Using these elements as a starting point can be a great creative exercise to make you think about how you’ll photograph your idea.
The senses – Once again, another popular mini-project could be portraying touch, smell, taste, sight, and sound. Will you also look to portray the sixth sense?

This set of images uses the same technique to display the 5 senses.

Take a mixture of photos

One of the keys to producing a successful series of photos is to mix things up. If your photos all look virtually the same, you’ll eventually run out of room to create. Ahead of changing the way you apply a photography technique you should maximize a particular way of photographing. You could well return to a particular concept and composition, especially if you travel somewhere new. That said, there are some simple, and effective ways of adding variety to your work, without the need to travel.

Composition – A change in how you compose your photo can give your photography technique a new twist.
Portraits – Using a technique like light painting or silhouettes? Think about how you can add some portraits to the set.
Landscapes – Are you doing low-key portraits? Is there a way to incorporate a landscape into the portrait photo? Crystal ball photography is a technique that lends itself very well to landscapes.
Macro – Get some closeup macro photos, and change the perspective of the viewer entirely.

With crystal ball photography, adding another ball can add to the variety.

Collaborate

Finally, you could look to collaborate with other photographers who are working in a similar area to your work. This can take the form of a joint project, where at the end you pool your work together. You could do a project where you make a title for the photo, and each person goes and interprets the concept in their own way. It’s also possible that by sharing work with each other, you’ll get ideas to progress your photography technique and concept even further.

Using alternative compositions adds an extra dimension to the crystal ball photography.

Turn your photography technique into a series!

Have you turned a particular photography technique into a series? What was your experience of this, and what did you do with your series once you produced it?

Are you thinking of creating a set of images focusing in on one particular technique to do this? What technique do you plan to use for your project? Hopefully, this article helps focus your mind on some of the things you can do to create a series of images.

As always, at Digital Photography School, we’d love to hear your thoughts, and see your images in the comments section! So please share your photographic series, either old or new.

The post How to Turn a Photography Technique into a Series appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Bond.

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Photographer uses ‘antique’ photo technique to illustrate struggles of Native Americans

17 Jun

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During the Dakota War of 1862, the United States government hung 38 members of the Dakota Indian Tribe in Mankato, Minnesota – the largest single-day mass execution in US history. A day after Shane Balkowitsch learned about this event – something most Americans have never heard of – he made the plate ‘Death by Oil’ (pictured above) using an antique photo process called wet plate collodion, which was first developed (no pun intended) in 1848.

The oil in the photo links the struggles of Native Americans in 1862 to the present time, in which they are again standing up to the US Government to protect their homeland. In this case, it is from the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline.

Wet plate photography requires subjects to sit still for long exposures, sometimes as long as 30 seconds. It involves applying a collodion emulsion onto a glass plate and sensitizing the plate for 3 minutes in a bath of silver nitrate, then taking the photo while the plate is still wet (which requires a portable darkroom). According to Balkowitsch, while the photos come out black and white, ‘they capture real life more beautifully and romantically’ and they will last for hundreds of years, unlike more traditional modern photographic prints. Balkowitsch is one of a very small group of photographers still using the collodion wet plate process and has made over 2300 plates since 2012.

Balkowitsch’s full collection of wet plate photos is available for viewing online.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Technique: The ‘Dolly Zoom’ can add new dimension to your video

15 Jun

We all know that a good camera is helpful when it comes to producing high quality video. Just as important, however, is how the camera moves. A good director or cinematographer can utilize camera motion in to set the mood, add emotion, or even to disorient the audience.

One of the most jarring camera moves – but a very effective one when used well – is the dolly zoom. Hitchcock made the move famous in Vertigo, and it has been used in many other films to add tension to a scene.

The dolly zoom works pretty much the way it sounds – you simultaneously zoom in or out on your subject while moving the camera in the opposite direction on a dolly. The result is a subject that appears to stay in place as the perspective of the scene changes noticeably. It takes a bit of practice, but employed correctly it can be very effective.

The video above from YouTube user ‘Now You See It’ does a great job of explaining the dolly zoom and how filmmakers have used it to great effect. It’s not a move to use every day, but it’s worth keeping in your back pocket so that when the opportunity arises you’re prepared to do it.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Light-painting technique with the Sony Cyber-shot RX100 V

05 Jun

The Sony Cyber-shot RX100 V is a powerful compact camera which packs a lot of technology into its pocketable body. For this video, we take the RX100 V out into the night, to shoot light-painting with LA-based photography duo ‘Nightcrawlers’.

We’ll show you how to prepare for a light-painting shoot, and sharing some tips for getting great shots using a variety of techniques.

Read our full Sony RX100 V review

See more videos at our YouTube Channel

This is sponsored content, created in partnership with Sony. What does this mean?

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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The good, the bad and the ugly of aerial photography – part 4: technique

18 Feb

A glacial river in Greenland

Getting your settings right is important when shooting from the air. Due to low light and strong vibration, many images from this shoot turned out blurry.

In the previous article in this series, I talked about the equipment one might use for aerial photography. So what about technique, and especially camera settings? What should you consider when shooting from the air?

The important thing to remember here is that you’re shooting from a moving, vibrating aircraft instead of from stable ground. This simply means that in order to keep your shots sharp, you’ll need to use a high shutter speed. Remember that the compensation mechanisms in stabilized lenses are meant to deal with human movement, not high-frequency vibration, and will thus offer little help. Same goes for your own hands’ stability: even if you’re rock solid, the aircraft is not, and you should always bear that in mind or suffer the consequences (as I unfortunately have in the past).

Depending on the angle of view, I’d recommend shooting at least 1/400^th of a second to make sure the shot is sharp enough, preferably even faster, and faster still if the focal length is long. When shooting from a plane, expect to need even faster shutter speeds, as wind can often move the lens and even change the zoom settings, as it sucks the lens out of the window. To keep your shutter speed in check, don’t be afraid to use a higher ISO setting. I frequently use ISO 400, 800 and when it’s darker even 1600 and 3200. Having a bit more noise and less dynamic range is a much better alternative to having a blurred shot. You can also use relatively wide apertures, since the subject is far away and depth of field is therefore large.

Shooting at ISO 800 is a no-brainer when light is low and you’re in a Cessna.

While I talked about equipment in the last article, I left one piece of gear to this article, since I wanted to link it to exposure times: Gyroscopes. These are contraptions which use rotational inertia to counter movement and vibrations, allowing the photographer to use much lower ISO values and longer exposure times while maintaining stability and sharpness. Unfortunately, they are large, heavy and very expensive, which leave them out as an option for the casual aerial shooter such as myself and most photographers with me. I personally don’t have any practical experience with gyros, but hopefully I’ll get to try shooting with one in the future.

Another point on technique: it’s very beneficial to shoot in fast-continuous mode. Even if exposure times are high, you never know when the vibrations take their toll on camera stability. Shooting the same image 2 or 3 times will significantly increase the chances that at least one of the exposures turns out crisp.

Another reason to shoot in continuous mode is HDR. HDR is surprisingly possible in aerial photography, and I use it in cases of extreme global contrast. Take for example the image below of the Holuhraun volcanic eruption in Iceland. Taken at night, the lava was quite a few stops brighter than its black surroundings, and so I used exposure bracketing together with continuous mode to quickly shoot two shots of the same scene with different exposure times, which were later combined using Photoshop.

With the lava many stops brighter than the surroundings, I had to use HDR to get this image.

Another surprisingly possible technical feat is panoramas. As long as all parameters are in check, there’s really no reason not to pano from the air, and one can really get interesting results that way. This is especially important due to aerial photography’s equipment limitation – when you’re stuck with one or two lenses, shooting a panorama allows you to achieve a wider angle of view.

A 2-shot panorama taken from a Cessna above the mountains of Lofoten, Arctic Norway. Due to the aircraft’s movement it was a bit of a difficult stitch, but still very possible and worthwhile.

In the next and final article in this series, I’ll survey several of my aerial shoots.

Erez Marom is a professional nature photographer, photography guide and traveler based in Israel. You can follow Erez’s work on Instagram, Facebook and 500px, and subscribe to his mailing list for updates.

If you’d like to experience and shoot some of the most fascinating landscapes on earth with Erez as your guide, you’re welcome to take a look at his unique photography workshops around the world:

Land of Ice – Southern Iceland
Winter Paradise – Northern Iceland
Northern Spirits – The Lofoten Islands
Giants of the Andes and Fitz Roy Hiking Annex – Patagonia
Tales of Arctic Nights – Greenland
Saga of the Seas and The Far Reaches Annex – The Faroe Islands
Desert Storm – Namibia

Selected Articles by Erez Marom:

Parallelism in Landscape Photography
Behind the Shot: Dark Matter
Mountain Magic: Shooting in the Lofoten Islands
Behind the Shot: Nautilus
Behind the Shot: Lost in Space
Behind the Shot: Spot the Shark
Quick Look: The Art of the Unforeground
Whatever it Doesn’t Take
Winds of Change: Shooting changing landscapes
On the Importance of Naming Images

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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An Unconventional Composition Technique to Improve Your Photos

01 Feb

Last month I sat down and reread Michael Freeman’s book, “The Photographer’s Mind.” which I do occasionally. I find that by revisiting the words of other photographers I remind myself of the multitude of tools available to us. There’s so much we can do to create fresh and amazing photographs.

One of those ways is to push our skills and update our thinking. I think I’ve read through Freeman’s book about two or three times now. Every few years I take it off the shelf again. His books are insightful and interesting to read. Freeman offers up unique ideas for composition using both conventional and unconventional techniques. The books are readily available. You can also check out our review of one of Freeman’s other books here; “The Photographer’s Eye”. In this article, let’s journey through one of the concepts he discusses in his book, “Engineered Disorder”.

An Unconventional Composition Technique to Improve Your Photos

The details of the image are broken up into sections by the heavy shadows.

What is Engineered Disorder?

Freeman explains that Engineered Disorder is the active effort of a photographer to use non-conventional methods of composing photographs. Essentially, we are breaking the rules to create interesting images. Engineered Disorder means that we forget about conventional methods like unifying elements within the frame. We might allow ourselves to create uncluttered compositions. In one chapter Freeman talks about different methods of creating Engineered Disorder and bucking the system. He mentions using techniques such as disconnects, disruptive foreground, breaking the frame, superimposed layers and extremes of contrast. Maybe these terms sound complicated and a little too complex to understand, but they don’t have to be.

Let’s break down one of these techniques and see what’s involved in creating Engineered Disorder. We will discuss the use of extreme lighting or chiaroscuro to create disconnect within an image. It’s one of my favorite techniques. I love to include deep blacks and bright highlights in my compositions.

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro – chi·a·ro·scu·ro – the treatment of light and shade in drawing, painting, and photography.

Using this technique means that we employ very hard lighting to break up the unity of a composition. The image becomes a series of pieces that communicate meaning but are broken up by dark shadows and bright highlights. Conventional composition techniques would say that using this type of technique makes for a bad photograph, but remember we are pushing the elements of composition.

An Unconventional Composition Technique to Improve Your Photos

The strong shadows in this image hide some details from the viewer. The leaf can only be viewed in pieces. This means a viewer has to pause and take in each part of the image separately and then piece together the whole scene. Making a viewer stop and study your image is important. Given the number of photographs out there you want to make viewers take some time to digest your images rather than scan through and move on.

Experimenting with dark and light

Consider my careful experimentation with Chiaroscuro. This image portrays the common Canada goose in a much more unique fashion. In the opening moments of golden hours, these geese become elegant shadows. The different sections of light and dark create interesting graphic qualities within the image.

An Unconventional Composition Technique to Improve Your Photos

In this second image, I’ve used auto tone to create a more conventional image. While the actual shot is very similar, these two different treatments create considerably different photographs. Which one do you prefer?

A more conventional exposure.

Other examples

Here’s another example of Chiaroscuro. This is a photograph of a unique area near my home. Everyone calls this place The Badlands. The red and gray clay create these beautiful graphic designs which draw visitors to the area. The hills are in danger of being destroyed by visitors, but the area is truly beautiful. The shadows and the light create beautiful diagonal lines in this particular image.

This are is now off limits to visitors because of the damage caused by walking on the hills.

In this final image, the light and darks highlight different circular objects. Perhaps this image isn’t as disconnected as the others but it still presents a unique treatment for the door of a fishing boat. The image focuses on graphic design elements of the boat rather than the uses of the vessel. The image has been turned into an abstract and most viewers will need to analyze the image before they can determine the exact subject matter.

An Unconventional Composition Technique to Improve Your Photos

Conclusion – your turn

Experimenting with different techniques is never a bad thing. You can learn and improve your photos by playing with unconventional techniques. Creating these images certainly pushed the dynamic capabilities of my camera. Exposing for deep shadows can be a challenge all on its own, but it’s a lot of fun to try out these different techniques.

While we’ve only discussed one of the methods for creating Engineered Disorder, these three examples clearly highlight the technique. It’s better to fully understand just one compositional method rather than scratching the surface of several techniques. Give it a try, and go a little bit extreme. Break away from the conventional and search for ways to compose images that harness the power of Engineered Disorder in your photography. Please share your results in the comments below.

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Abandoned Montage: VFX Film Technique Adapted to Eerie Art Series

14 Jan

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Photographs of abandoned houses and dreary, overgrown landscapes are layered with hand-painted elements on glass panels in a technique called ‘matte painting’, one of the original VFX techniques used in filmmaking. Disparate imagery comes together in a way that doesn’t quite make sense, placing entire forests inside the darkened parlor of a deteriorating mansion or pairing wallpaper-like landscape scenes with real greenery inside a partially collapsed room.

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Artist Suzanne Moxhay, based in London, utilizes this early 20th century filmmaking technique – which was also used in more recent motion pictures like Star Wars, Mary Poppins, Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Birds – as the basis for each of her unsettling scenes. On live-action sets, paintings on glass would be integrated with the camera to become part of the scene.

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Instead of creating hers in situ, Moxhay draws from an archive of collected images and her own photography, building up the images in her studio using cutout fragments of the source material, which she makes into tiny stage sets on glass panels. Then, she takes a photo of the result, finally manipulating them digitally to remove them even further from their original context and make them into something entirely new.

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“In my recent work I have been exploring concepts of spatial containment in montages built from fragments of photographed and painted interiors,” says Moxhay. “Architectures are disrupted by analogous elements – contradictory light sources, faulty perspective, paradoxes of scale. Light casts shadows in the wrong direction, walls fail to meet in corners, an area of the image can be seen either as an enclosing wall or dark overcast sky.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Simple Studio Technique: Pet Portraits

03 Dec

Perfect pet portraits

A few weeks ago we visited an animal adoption center in Seattle, to shoot some portraits of the dogs (and cats) awaiting owners at The Motley Zoo. When we published our video feature recently, many of you wanted a little more information about how we shot the images, so we’ve put together a slideshow of some of our favorite shots, including some bonus images not used in the video.

Click through to see the photos, and for those of you who were curious, we’ve included more information on the lighting and setup we used on the shoot. Also, they’re pictures of pets, what more do you want?

Lighting

For lights we used three Sony HVL-60M flashes, two of which were attached to softboxes and positioned on stands.

The flash on the camera played the role of TTL trigger, while the other two off-camera flashes fired through the softboxes to provide illumination.

Lighting

The key light, which was placed just slightly above eye-level for the dogs and off to the left, was fired through a Westcott Rapid Box 26″ Octa Softbox.

The second light was an overhead fill bounced off the silver inside of a 60″ umbrella, to save space in the relatively small room in which we were working. This light was placed off to the right of the setup, aimed to cover both the backdrop and the subject, to provide a bit of fill light and illuminate the backdrop.

Get their attention

When working with animals it’s very important to bring something to grab their attention.

For dogs, treats are always a great way to have them look wherever you want, as long as they’re well behaved. With Ginger Rogers, the sweet little blind Poodle pictured above, we borrowed a squeaky toy that the shelter calls the ‘Photo Pig’. They call it that because it’s shaped like a pig. And they use it to get the dogs’ attention for photos.

Photo Pig.

Shoot from eye-level

Shooting from a pet’s eye level helps in a few ways.

First, it’s a better angle for classic ‘head and shoulders’ shots when combined with a longer focal length, presenting the dog as a more ‘human’ subject, giving the image more personality.

Second, it can help with intimidation, or rather avoiding intimidation, especially with smaller breeds. Just watch out, some dogs love to give kisses when you squat down to their level. Keep your front element covered, or have something handy to clean it.

Posing your pet

Profile shots are a great way to add variety in sets of shots taken at the same time.

Be sure to keep the subject facing the side that the light is on, so their face isn’t lost in shadow and they still get ‘catch lights’ in their eyes.

What about cats?

Cats are a bit more tricky than dogs. We tried, but our hit-rate wasn’t quite as high as we needed it to be. It’s harder to get a cat’s attention, and they can get aggressive and skittish if they’re not in a co-operative mood.

Toy with them

Getting cats to sit still can be a nightmare. Sound tends to startle cats, so for this kitten portrait we ditched the Photo Pig in favor of feathers attached to a string on the end of a pole. Dangling it just out of shot kept his chin up for the picture.

Watch your settings

We were using the Sony a6300 for this shoot, and overall the camera worked well. Off-camera TTL lights made setting up the exposure quite easy.

When using flash on a mirrorless camera, make sure you’re not in exposure preview mode, otherwise, at typical flash exposure settings you’ll just be looking at a completely dark, underexposed preview image.

Also, be aware that battery-powered flashes can have quite long recycle times, especially when fired through modifiers. The modifiers, while necessary for this soft diffused look, sap light, requiring the flash to be used at a higher power level.

Focus tips

When stopped down past F8 the a6300’s switches to contrast detection in AF-C mode, slowing down the ability to keep up with skittish pets. To avoid this, we switched the camera to AF-S to get rid of the distracting hunting. Inevitably, this left us with some shots that aren’t entirely sharp in the right place. But with a bit of processing, even the shots that aren’t 100% sharp on the animals’ eyes are still perfectly usable for a web gallery.

Pet Portraits

If you’re interested in adopting any of the animals you’ve seen here, we’re sure The Motley Zoo would love to hear from you. We hope you enjoyed this quick look behind the scenes of a fun photo shoot. Check out the video, if you haven’t already and share your tips for pet portraits in the comments!

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Posts Tagged ‘technique’

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Release your creative expression

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Conclusion

Choose the photography technique for your series

Have a narrative

Combine techniques

Look to themes

Take a mixture of photos

Collaborate

Turn your photography technique into a series!

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Perfect pet portraits

Lighting

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Get their attention

Shoot from eye-level

Posing your pet

What about cats?

Toy with them

Watch your settings

Focus tips

Pet Portraits