photographing animals (particularly dogs)

[PRH]

Hi everyone,
my sister is an artist that illustrates dogs for a living from the clients favourite snap shots. She's been trying to give tips to her clients on the best ways to photograph their pets. (the better the photo, the easier it is for her to recreate them as pencil illustrations)...

Anyway, she's asked me if I could help out but I don't really photograph animals so other than "don't take photo's in the middle of a very sunny day", I'm lost for anything useful to tell her.
Can anyone help out?

Her current client has a black dog and the photo she was given shows no detail in the fur. Any tips would be greatly appreciated but preferably aimed at people using point and shoot cameras.

[Eross18]

Well I know when I had my point and shoot camera, I would do most indoors with flash. Although u may need to edit the eyes for the glowing eye. Lol. But either make a noise or a high pitched hum and it will get the dog looking at you and if u do it long enough he will tilt his head making a cuter shot. It's also best to be level with the dog, so ur at their angle
hope it helps. That's what I always did

[OsmosisStudios]

Find a local dog park, throw on a fast telephoto zoom, sit in the grass on an overcast day and enjoy.

[mosgood]

Hi PRH!

I would say you'd have better luck shooting dogs/animals with a zoom lens & a DSLR. I have 2. My older knock-around is a Minolta 7D, with a couple of lenses, one was a kit lens the other 2 were from my film days. My newer camera (to me anyway) is a Nikon D200. I have one 18-200mm VR lens, a prime 50mm, & macro 35mm.



This portrait was taken just yesterday at the local dog park. I used the on-camera flash to bring out his eyes, & detail in his fur. P&S are ok for just candids, or when you don't want to drag around anything really big or heavy. I've had more success photographing dogs with a faster shutter speed. Dogs are like kids & rarely sit still for very long, especially when there's stuff going on that's more interesting to them. The problem I've had with point & shoot cameras is that they have a long processing time before they activate the shutter, which makes for some less than stellar photos, ie your subject has moved out of frame.

Good luck!