[frogoutofwater]

My favourite subject for photography is animals, and I particularly enjoy photographing pets - mine, other peoples' pets, ... and pets looking for a home. I volunteer as a photographer for a local animal rescue organization (Mighty Mutts/Ollie's Place) and have been learning by doing over the past six months or so. I imagine that there are a number of other Pentaxians, including some who post on the "Your Pet a Day" thread, who either volunteer as photographers at shelters or are interested in doing so. So I decided to start this thread, so that we can share our tips with each other - as well as our photographs.

If you photograph shelter animals, what are your top tips? Here are a few from me, to get things started:

1. Take sanitary precautions, especially if you have pets at home. (I'm particularly careful around the cats at the shelter because I have cats.) Wash your hands on arrival. Minimize handling the pets, especially around eyes, noses, etc. Wash your hands before you leave. Strip off when you get home and throw your clothes in the wash before handling your own pets.

2. Make the shelter staff's and volunteers' experience at the shelter easier. Make sure you understand the ground rules of how to interact with the animals - don't give your own treats or toys unless someone approves it first (they might have dietary or behavioral issues). Go with the flow instead of trying to impose your vision of how the perfect photo shoot would be, especially at the beginning. With each return visit, you can work on improving something, but don't push for perfect all at once. Be consistent and reliable. I try to go every other week at about the same time, and I always upload the photos I've taken within 24 hours (usually within 6 hours). (These are the things the volunteers told me they liked about how I worked with them, in comparison with their experiences with certain other photographers.)

3. You might luck out and be given a relatively uncluttered environment with good light in which to do your photographs. It's just as likely that you'll end up in a cluttered and/or poorly lit location. If that's the case, then you might try shooting fairly wide open, and ideally with a bit of distance between the dog or cat and the background, so you can blur out the background. (For pet photography, generally I prefer to shoot at around 6.3, especially with dogs, to get as much of the head in focus as possible (with the focus point on the near eye), but I often find that I need to shoot at about f/4 and ISO 3200 in order to get a decent shot with decent shutter speed indoors.) For indoor work, I also use a flash with a Gary Fong light diffuser.

4. I certainly pay attention to what's in the frame and try to de-clutter as much as possible. But for me it's most important to catch the moment, which can be so fleeting. So I try to leave some space around the edges, and crop and clone later.

5. I find that some of the best photos I take are ones where there is some human-animal interaction. With smaller dogs and with cats, you can often get a great photo, if a volunteer stands or sits facing away from you and holds the dog or cat over his shoulder looking at you - take some shots like that and some with the volunteer turning his or her head toward the dog or cat. Sometimes, you might need to provide some instruction to the person holding the animal - for example, you might want them to stroke the pet so that it responds to the touch, but not to move their hands too quickly because then you end up with a blurry image. Similarly, if a volunteer is helping by drawing the pet's attention with a toy or something similar, you might need to explain that you need them to focus the animal's attention in a space with a cleaner background, and that they should use the toy in a way that gets the animal to move but not move too frantically.

6. I often find that the best shots happen after I've just been hanging around for a while, usually sitting on the floor watching the action. The animals relax around me a little (and so do the volunteers) and I get to capture some interesting behavior. It's kind of like street photography - find a good location, sit still and wait to see what happens in the space.

7. I've experimented with portable backdrops and nothing has really worked well so far. However, once the weather gets a little better and I'm doing more outdoor work (at Union Square in NYC), I'm planning to bring a solid blue, fleece-lined water resistant picnic blanket with me. It can function almost like a seamless backdrop, with the dog sitting on it and either a volunteer holding it behind the dog or maybe clipping it to the bars of the fence. I can throw it in the wash when I get home.

Forum moderators - I'm not sure if this is the best forum for this thread. Since it's at least partly about technique, I thought it would be a good place to start, but please feel free to move it if you think it fits better somewhere else.

Here are some links to my shelter pet photography:

Adoptable Dogs at Mighty Mutts

Adoptable Cats at Ollie's Place - frogoutofwater

And here are a couple of my favourite photos:

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[Racer X 69]

Great tips.

I especially like the comment about getting down to the level of the animals, and spending some time hanging out until they get relaxed and comfortable. As for backdrops, how about using a lens that will allow for a more shallow depth of field and good bokeh? That way the out of focus area becomes a backdrop of sorts. This could work OK provided the colors are complimentary to the fur of the subject, right?

[frogoutofwater]

Great tips.

I especially like the comment about getting down to the level of the animals, and spending some time hanging out until they get relaxed and comfortable. As for backdrops, how about using a lens that will allow for a more shallow depth of field and good bokeh? That way the out of focus area becomes a backdrop of sorts. This could work OK provided the colors are complimentary to the fur of the subject, right?

Using a lens that allows for shallow depth of field helps, but I find that I need to balance getting sufficient DOF to get detail in the face and shallow enough DOF to blur the background. When I photograph the dogs (which occurs outside), I can often get some distance between the dog and me, and between the dog and the background for that to work. On the other hand, many dogs have longer faces, which tend to require greater DOF. When I photograph the cats (indoors), it's often in tight quarters - I'm close to them (often only a few feet away) and they're close to walls or other objects, so it's harder to get a blurred background. On the other hand, their faces are flatter so I can usually user a lower F-stop. Usually, I find that I need f/6.3 for the bigger dogs, but can get away with f/4 for cats and smaller dogs with shorter noses.

With lenses, I usually do a fair bit with my trusty zoom (18-135), because I'm often shifting from focusing on an animal near to me to one further away (or the animal moves). But I also bring along a portrait lens (either the 50 f/1.8 or the 77/f.18) and do some shots with that as well.

The environment in which I shoot might be a fair bit different from what other shelter photographers encounter - they might be able to photograph one dog or cat at a time. I photograph dogs at Mighty Mutts' weekly adoption drive at Union Square, so I'm usually photographing 3-6 dogs (not in a group, but I shift from dog to dog depending on what's going on). We're either outside on a street corner, surrounded by crowds (including passers-by who stop to interact with the dogs) or in the foyer of a friendly Petco (in bad weather). When I photograph the cats, I do it in a shelter that is long and narrow. There usually are 6-7 cats roaming around during playtime in the front room, and another 3-5 in the back - plus volunteers and visitors.

One photographer whose shelter photography work completely blows me away is Mary Shannon Johnstone and her Landfill Dogs project. Check it out here:

Landfill Dogs

[ToyTank]

I like tip #5, as it never occurred to me, and especially with a slightly skittish shelter animal getting a good framed shot can be tough.

I just started volunteering at the county run shelter here. My first impressions of what is useful would be quick AF, and shorter FL(<50) and maybe work a little obedience training in to help get a steady shot.

Edit: They have me photograph one dog or cat at a time, and they let me know the animals who "need" it most, usually the older or disabled, or less "desirable" like pit bulls...but they told me I could photograph any cat or dog in the shelter I want who has a "green tag" which means friendly to people.

[atupdate]

I foster dogs for SICSA. Last year we specialized in puppies (8 litters with 4 moms and 29 puppies). I have posted most of them in the Pets thread.





I also took a couple of in-shelter photos of dogs that needed a refresh on the website (been there for a couple of months). What I learned is that it very difficult to get them to sit still on a backdrop.





You definitely need someone to handle the dogs while you take the pictures. Dog treats and squeaky toys are a must.

Tim

[frogoutofwater]

Those are great posed photos, Tim. Fostering puppies sounds like heaven ( I know it's a huge amount of work - but puppies!)

I read about a photographer using a harmonica as a device to get a dog to pause and tiltbits head in an appealing way.

[atupdate]

Those are great posed photos, Tim. Fostering puppies sounds like heaven ( I know it's a huge amount of work - but puppies!)

I read about a photographer using a harmonica as a device to get a dog to pause and tiltbits head in an appealing way.

Thanks. It took a bit of cloning, as both dogs ended up sitting partly on the background cloth and partly on the floor. If I do it again, I'll just look for an uncluttered area and shoot without a backdrop.

The puppies are fun and a lot of work. I've also taken their pictures for posting on the website when they are ready for adoption.

Taken with a snooted flash from behind-right and a diffused flash in front-left.


Taken with a single bounced (ceiling) off-camera flash


I think it would be helpful if people could post the lighting set-ups with any future posts with pictures. The posed shots in my first post used an off-camera bounce flash (wall) and large window light as the primary light.

Tim

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Last edited by atupdate; 02-17-2014 at 01:12 PM.

[frogoutofwater]

These are amazing shots, Tim. The light is wonderful, and that's one of my weaknesses. I'm still struggling to get my Pentax flash off my camera and better positioned to bring out the best in the pets. When I get back from an upcoming trip (3 weeks in Borneo!), mastering off-camera flash is my number one photography project.

When I'm indoors shooting these days, I'm using the flash on-camera with a Gary Fong light diffuser to soften it a bit. It works for the busy and crowded environment I'm working in, but I want to develop better technique for this.

[atupdate]

These are amazing shots, Tim. The light is wonderful, and that's one of my weaknesses. I'm still struggling to get my Pentax flash off my camera and better positioned to bring out the best in the pets. When I get back from an upcoming trip (3 weeks in Borneo!), mastering off-camera flash is my number one photography project.

When I'm indoors shooting these days, I'm using the flash on-camera with a Gary Fong light diffuser to soften it a bit. It works for the busy and crowded environment I'm working in, but I want to develop better technique for this.

The Mom + Puppy pictures I posted were taken with the following flash diffuser: DIY Reflector-Diffuser. I use it a lot when I don't have the time to set up my off camera flash stands.

Tim

[JHfwp]

Great information, that's very good of you. Same with the others that donate their time. The world needs more people like you!

[mikemike]

Thanks, this advice is great. I think much of it is also appropriate for taking pictures of babies and small children who have about the same attention span as a pet but are much more active. I have always felt like taking pictures of my kids is more like wildlife photography of small humans than it is portraiture.

[frogoutofwater]

Thanks, this advice is great. I think much of it is also appropriate for taking pictures of babies and small children who have about the same attention span as a pet but are much more active. I have always felt like taking pictures of my kids is more like wildlife photography of small humans than it is portraiture.

Ha ha. I got started with portraiture by photographing pets and then moved on to humans. I quickly had to adjust my interaction technique, though, because I realized that waving a fuzzy toy or tapping my lens cap on a table to make a noise to attract the pet's attention didn't work well with adults. (Worked surprisingly well with little kids, though.)

I also notice a big difference between photographing dogs (especially those that are attached to their humans) and cats. With cats, you can often have their human in the room and it won't have a big impact - the cat will pay attention to you if it's interested in what you're doing and usually doesn't get distracted by its human. Some dogs, however, are almost overly responsive to their humans' signals - they sometimes move too much or too quickly.

[mikemike]

At least with dogs and cats you don't have to deal with them deliberately trying to sabotage your shot. I'm just so happy that the bad shots don't cost anything.

How many of these shots do I have to take


to get one of these?


You don't want to know...

[wildman]

My sincere respect and appreciation for the work you are doing. I wouldn't have the heart for it.

It would be a good time to point out that just because we have a $1000 worth of gear hanging around our neck that we too are animals as are they.

Thank you.

[mikemike]

I think this would be a great photo challenge or contest. Volunteer and take some pictures of shelter dogs and and enter them into a contest or something help the forums and the animals and local SPCA chapters.