How To Take Pictures Of Pets

Many people have taken pets as part of their life and it is not uncommon that you want to include your lovely pet in your pictures. However, taking pictures of your pet is certainly a challenging task because they can't take direction like people. You will have tougher time taking a snap your pet if it is active and always running around.

So, below are a few tips to help you take pictures of your pet.

1. Understand them

Since you are the master, you should be familiar with your pet behavior. You should know what ticks them and when they will be quite and cute. Once you know that, you will know how to lead your pet into the emotion.

You can wiggle a piece of feather in front of your cat to make it leap or capture its action to grab the feather with its paws. Don't you think it is kind of cute?

However, as much as you need to understand your pet to take its picture, sometime it can be fun to have one or two surprise shot from your pet. Although this might not sound proper, you can actually provoke (not getting yourself hurt of course) your pet to get its angry picture. This can be one of the abnormal pictures of your lovely pet.

2. Patience

Ever heard of "patience is the best virtue"? I think you have to hold on to that when you want that special shot of your pet. Sometime your pet will lay still and rest when you are expecting some action from it. And when you are tired of waiting and decided to snap the silent side of your pet, it suddenly sprung into action and spoils your frame.

It is like they know what you want and decided to make fun of you. I know how annoying that can be. Still, pets are unlike human subject, sometime you just have to follow their mood.

3. Look for emotion

Despite of what you might think, animals do express their emotion on their face. However, you probably only see that when you are familiar with them as your pet. I personally saw a stray cat showed its hungry face at me and I regretted that I didn't have my camera at that time. I believe it will be a good picture. But I still feed it, just incase you want to know.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that pets only show their true emotion when they really mean it and that might take you some time before you can catch that in pictures.

4. Natural light

When you are taking pictures of your pet, remember to use natural light as much as you can. This is because the sudden burst of flash can startle your pet and make it uneasy for the rest of the photograph shoot.

By the way, animals' eyes don't share the same anatomy as human. It is very common to see red eyes when you flash on them.

5. Angle

Just like any digital photography tips told you before, you need to find an angle to bring out the uniqueness of your subject. And this goes the same with pet photography.

You can set your camera at ground and lead your pet to examine it. This is how the photographers get the curious expression of the pet with their head huge in the pictures. Or you can try standing taking the picture while your dog is sitting and looking up to you. You can get a better picture if you can get its sad puppy face into the picture.

Pets photography can be fun and you can make it even more enjoyable with some creativity during the shooting.

Happy taking picture with your pet,

Michael Wong.