I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. More pet photos. Let me get the standard tip out of the way first:
Be patient when photographing your pets. They don’t know what a camera is and they have no concept of what a picture is. Getting frustrated with them because they won’t frame into your picture correctly will just upset them and make them afraid whenever you get your camera out. Now these dogs in these pictures are starting to understand that my camera out means the treat train is arriving very soon. If you do pet photography correctly then the pets you photograph often will come to associate great things with your camera and start to pose every time.
With that out of the way, let’s get into trickier pets – pets with dark or black fur. Dark fur can pose numerous problems because it is easy to have your sensor over adjust and suddenly you got a silhouette of a dog. There are several ways you can address this issue, but you have to put a little more thought into things. Thankfully, every trick you learn to use when working with dark fur will help your photography out tremendously and will help you out in low light situations.
Anyway, the three easy approaches are this:
1) Consider your background – if you put a black dog in white snow, your scenario changes drastically. Granted you don’t always have snow, but you have greenery or other colors to play off of and help utilize the dog’s fur to make it the center of attention.
2) Use a flash to help give the dog some depth. Darker color absorbs light, which is why your camera sometimes goes overboard in trying to figure out how to deal with animals with dark fur. If you throw some light in up front that will help the sensor in your camera find that depth.
3) Processing tools. This is the easiest but does add an extra step in your workflow. You can use the shadows slider in most photo processing tools to help counter what your camera’s sensor is doing. Just be sure you are shooting in RAW format when you take the pictures. Processing tools love photos in RAW or your camera’s equivalent of RAW.
Anyway, all these were shot using light from a window. Processing tools were used to add depth to the cat and dog. Also, the cat isn’t in some sort of kitty lockup, that’s just a play area for kids so the dogs don’t mistake the toys for chew toys.