Techniques for photographing black dogs?

[Disfidare]

All the fur-friends in our family are Hungarian Pulis. They are sheep dogs - fast, agile, fun and DARN hard to take a decent photo of - or so I'm finding.

My In-Laws have just adopted a new puppy, so we went out to visit today. I found I was having a lot of trouble with exposure. It seemed that I was either:

1) Correctly exposing the background and under exposing the dog,

or

2) Correctly exposing the dog and over exposing the background.

I imagine that wedding photographers have the same trouble - bride in white, groom in black.

At the moment I'm finding that the lessor of the two evils is to under expose the dog, as I can usually fiddle about with it in PS. Once the background is blown out, there doesn't seem to be much that can be done to fix it.

Does anyone have any advice on how to better balance photos of black dogs?

[teaking]

How are you metering, or are you shooting in manual?

It may be best to treat it like a portraits sports event lol if the dogs running around outside. I would try to use spot metering with some EV compensation but not right down to -2 because you would still want detail in the blacks so maybe -1 1/2 and play with it increase or decrease to your liking. I would also try the continuous focus method you prefer and see how the shots come out.

Orrrr... I could be really wrong

[Disfidare]

Thanks!

I'll have a read & google on the points you made - I'm still taking baby steps, having only just graduated from POS to SLR.

[kencaleno]

Originally Posted by Disfidare

All the fur-friends in our family are Hungarian Pulis. They are sheep dogs - fast, agile, fun and DARN hard to take a decent photo of - or so I'm finding.

My In-Laws have just adopted a new puppy, so we went out to visit today. I found I was having a lot of trouble with exposure. It seemed that I was either:

1) Correctly exposing the background and under exposing the dog,

or

2) Correctly exposing the dog and over exposing the background.

I imagine that wedding photographers have the same trouble - bride in white, groom in black.

At the moment I'm finding that the lessor of the two evils is to under expose the dog, as I can usually fiddle about with it in PS. Once the background is blown out, there doesn't seem to be much that can be done to fix it.

Does anyone have any advice on how to better balance photos of black dogs?

Wedding photographers take incident readings,and get detail in black tuxedo and white wedding dress- and as for black animal fur, you generally close down 1-2 stops ,
(Zone III/IVon the Weston-Adams Zone system) Regards,Ken