| Archive for Rescue Remedies.myfastforum.org Rescue Remedies Forum |
| xxlynne |
Taking dog photos Your tipsCalm: Despite the temptation it pays to wait until at least 10 mins into your walk so the dog begins to calm and slow down.Toilet: Avoid at all costs taking a dog when they are stationary going to the loo Engage:Try to gain eye contact with the camera in a few; holding your hand and clicking your fingers or a stick or something to catch their attention helps. Backdrop: Be aware of the back ground. Tha better quality background you take the more 'worth' it gives the dog. I personally love flowers in the scene. Human engagement: It's wonderful; you allow the observer to imagine the dog with themselves. Leave it out! If in doubt leave it out Better to not use a photo than to actually put up an inferior image. Scale:Try if you can try to give a sense of the dog's size. Off lead feel:Try to keep the impact of the lead out of the photo Get what you pay for: Better quality camera helps |
| xristine |
The problem with shooting photos of animals is that they don't understand about staying still, looking at the camera and not doing something repulsive... The result is you can end up with blurry photos or less than perfect photos.
There are a couple of things you can do with less than perfect photos. 1. Make the photo smaller. The smaller the photo the more in focus it will appear. It's harder to make an image look good the bigger you make it. This was taken with a Point and Shoot FILM camera and scanned. It's a very poor quality image as you can see. It was taken many years ago! 
But if I scale it down it looks fine and the image appears sharper. 
2. Crop it... remove bits that might be distracting. This was taken with a Minolta DiMage - a tiny digital camera that will fit in the pocket of your jeans or your shirt! It's very slow and you can see that there is some blurring and distraction to the left hand side. 
I can crop like this 
If you want to manipulate images free of charge then you can use something like Picasa available from google. www.picasa.google.co.uk A lot of cameras come with software you can manipulate images with. Most of the photos you see and admire by professionals will be heavily manipulated out of the camera using software. Actually quite a lot of problems can be fixed out of the camera. If you want to take action shots then you need the photo taken fast so the light needs to be good. The brighter the light the faster your shot will be and the less chance of blurriness. If the light is poor then it's best to get the dog to sit or keep still. A second person present is always useful because they can hold the lead or attract the dog's attention. Sometimes a dog looking away from the camera but into the frame or looking at something we can see in the background can be very appealing. Finally, the more dogs you try to shoot at once, the harder it is. Getting their attention all at once is really hard. You need a fast shot and you should try taking a few to give you a choice. I hope this helps. I apologise if I'm teaching granny to suck eggs. 
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| reclaimingrebus |
useful stuff Xstine, my photos are rubbish. |
| xristine |
It's practice that's all. I had a good laugh sorting though my dog pictures as I took up photography *after* my dog died so I was in the embarrassing state of having zero decent photos of dogs to put up! I almost put a picture of a hamster up just to prove I can actually take photos that are in focus
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