Shooting With Animals

Now here is a fun topic for today's blog! Shooting with animals! for todays example I will be using as my example the most used animal mostly because it is so ready available, Dogs. We start with picking your model Canine depending on your shoot, you will select the breed, but in the breed of dog select make sure it is a stable one.  The last thing you want is a dog snapping at you or your model. 

After you choose your dog, think about your lighting equipment; Hot lights or strobe. Dogs overheat easily and strobes seem to be the obvious choice, but the flash from the strobes could scare the dog and take personality from its face. 

The images used for this blog were taken with three 1600 watt hotlights on 32' softboxes, with two settings, medium and full blast.  These images are about 4 years old and I cannot remember the brand of the hotlights. 

I used hotlights because that was all I had available to me at the time. The Dog named Cuervo is a very stable one. one of the disadvantages of the hot lights was that we could only shoot for a short periods at a time. The lights were too hot and Cuervo kept walking of the set too cool down. However the hot lights gave very vibrant color. If I had to redo this shoot I would again use hotlights.