How to photograph your pet
4 min read · Updated
Every photograph on this site was taken by somebody with an animal that would not sit still. Most of what makes a good pet photograph is not equipment: it is where the light comes from, how low you get, what you focus on, and whether you were willing to wait.
Light, and why not the flash
Window light is the best light most people have. Put the animal a metre or two from a window on an overcast day and you have soft, directional light with no equipment at all.
Avoid direct flash. It startles animals, it produces the eerie eye-shine that comes from the reflective layer behind a cat or dog's retina, and it flattens whatever texture the coat had. If you must use light, bounce it off a ceiling.
Outdoors, the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset are worth the inconvenience. Midday sun puts hard shadows in the eye sockets, which is exactly where you want detail.
Backlight — the animal between you and the window — gives a rim of light through the coat and works beautifully on anything fluffy, provided you expose for the face rather than the window.
Get down to their level
The commonest fault in pet photographs is that they are taken from human standing height, looking down. It makes the animal look small and distant, and it is how everybody already sees them.
Kneel, sit, or lie on the floor so the camera is at the animal's eye level or slightly below. This one change improves more photographs than any other.
For a small dog or a cat that means being on the ground. It is undignified and it works.
Focus on the eye
If the eyes are sharp the photograph works, even if the ears and nose are soft. If the eyes are soft, nothing rescues it.
Most phones and cameras will now find and hold an animal's eye if you let them — look for animal eye detection in the settings, which is genuinely good on recent hardware.
Otherwise tap the eye to focus rather than the middle of the animal.
A catchlight — the small bright reflection of a window in the eye — is what makes an animal look alive rather than taxidermied. It is another reason to shoot near a window.
Movement
Use a fast shutter speed. A dog shaking or running needs 1/500 of a second or quicker; a cat pouncing, quicker still. On a phone, that usually means finding more light rather than changing a setting.
Shoot bursts. The difference between a good action photograph and a bad one is often three frames, and no one has the reflexes to pick the right one in advance.
For a portrait, get the movement out of the animal first. A walk beforehand makes a settled subject, and a settled subject makes a better photograph than any amount of patience with an over-excited one.
Difficult coats
Black animals are the classic problem. A camera meters for average brightness and will make a black dog grey and muddy. Deliberately underexpose by half a stop to a stop to keep the black actually black, and use side light so the coat has some shape rather than reading as a silhouette. Avoid dark backgrounds, which lose the outline entirely.
White animals are the opposite: a camera will make them grey and blow out the detail in the fur. Underexpose slightly and check the highlights.
For a black-and-white animal, expose for the white and accept the black going dark. Recovering a shadow is possible; recovering a blown highlight is not.
Getting their attention, and knowing when to stop
A new noise gets one good reaction and then stops working. Save it for when you are focused and ready rather than using it up.
Have someone else hold the treat or the toy, just above the lens, so the animal looks into the camera rather than off to the side.
Have the camera at your eye before the noise, not after.
And keep sessions short. Ten minutes with an interested animal beats an hour with a bored one, and an animal that learns the camera means being pestered will start leaving the room when it appears.
One thing that should not need saying but does: never put an animal somewhere uncomfortable, precarious or frightening for a photograph, and never dress one in something that restricts its breathing or movement. That applies double to flat-faced breeds in warm weather. No photograph is worth it, and the good ones almost never come from a posed animal anyway — they come from an animal doing something it was going to do regardless, with somebody nearby who was ready.