Intentional Lighting for Dog Photography

Alas, this is not a manual.  In fact, someone really should write a book about using lighting when photographing dogs.  Because I am currently reading 'Lighting Essentials: A Subject Centric Approach' (which is, apparently on of the 'seminal' works on photography lighting), and while the guy has some very good advice (I'll get to that in a second) he is photographing people.  Who stand where they are told to stand and look in whatever direction they are told to look.  Not so much with my dogs, so setting up lighting takes on the added element of trying to figure out where they might move to, or how I can quickly move the lighting to adapt to the moving dogs.  Again, the guy doesn't address this in the book at all.

Actually, that's not entirely true (although there are no dog photos in his book).  The whole of point of the book comes down to this: rather than setting up your lighting and then fitting your subject into the mix, think in advance what you are trying to achieve with the photo and how you want to portray the subject, and then set your lighting to achieve your 'pre-visualized' photo.  Needless to say, all of this assumes that 1) you know in advance what you are trying to achieve and 2) you have the technical know-how to achieve it.  The author does provide a bunch of examples and explains why he used an umbrella/bare speedlight/soft box/reflector/daylight/combination thereof to achieve certain looks, which is very helpful, although the creativity part of things is left as an exercise for the student.

All that said, the basic tenet of the book has resonated with me.  While I don't blindly shoot photos (well, not all the time), I don't always put a lot of forethought into what I'm really 'shooting for' (so to speak) and how to best achieve it.   Today was partly-cloudy, then rainy and then clearing in the late afternoon, so while the girls got in plenty of tennis ball action, I decided to try to get some photos where I had specific goals. 

I leave for work at a painfully early hour of the morning, and as I walk down the stairs, the rest of the house is still dark, and I always look upstairs, and see the girls looking at me as I leave, clearly asking me when I'm coming home.  I have wanted to get a photo of this, but when I'm walking out the door, I'm not really organized enough to do it properly.  So I decided to 'recreate' it today.  I used a large softbox to send light up the stairs and have it diffused, like the stair light is when I leave, but it's not so bright that the stairwell looks much lighter than it does at 4:30am.  It took several tries, but I finally got something that was pretty close.

When I leave for work, they are usually either both standing up, or one has already gone back to sleep on the couch, but this is a pretty good approximation of how it looks when I leave.  I was really pleased with this.  It's also just a great portrait of the girls together.

After the stairwell photo, it had started to rain, and I decided I wanted to see if I could get a couple of other shots: I wanted to get photos that highlighted the girls' eyes - they have very pretty, bright eyes, and when the light catches their eyes just right, they positively glow.  I also wanted to see if I could get a photo of the two of them together where the lighting didn't end up leaving shadows from one snooter on the others' face.

Here were some of my best results with the eyes:

Less highlightin the eyes, but I really like the light that caught her ear on the right - it really frames her face nicely.

 

Some of the eye photos are really striking and some (like the last one) are more 'natural'.  But it was an interesting exercise, and one that I'm definitely going to return to.

Now on to the pictures of the girls together.  You would think it would be simple - stick a light in front of them, figure out how to position the camera without blocking the light (ideally the light would be above the camera) and call it good.  How difficult can that be?  It's not that difficult (other than the part about getting the girls to look in the same direction at the same time, and keep their eyes open - which is less easy when they are looking directly into a flashy light).   However, I like lighting from different positions, so I can capture a bit more of the 'texture' (aka fuzziness) of the girls.

Not perfectly lit (Fi's face is a little dark) but Fi looks so serious while Abby is less so - which is very much their personalities in a nutshell.

 

Obviously, the main light was coming from the left of the shot, but I was able to position a short continuous light between the girls so Fi's face wouldn't cast shadows on Abby. 

This was The Very Last Photo I shot today, and while I like all the photos I posted here of the two girls, I think this is one of the best I got all day - good lighting, good texture, and the girls were both sitting, looking the same direction and pretty much in line with each other so they both ended up in focus - a win all the way around!

Day 242/365.