How to Take a Pet Photograph

How to Take a Pet Photograph Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Benjamin who is a beginning photographer from Denmark. Benjamin says he’s just been shooting for a few months and he was house setting for Pearl of the cat went out into the garden and took a few pictures and really like this one. He says he loves all classic black and white photography. He did a black and white conversion in cameral raw. Benjamin shot this with a Nikon D90 using a 50-mm F18 Prime lens at ISO 400 expose to file for 1400 of a second shooting wide open at F18. And Benjamin says he just love to hear any comments about composition and any comments about technique that might help him and I’m quoting here on this exciting journey and I totally agree with you right there Benjamin about this being an exciting journey and big thank you to Benjamin for sharing this images. It’s just amazing. I grew up with the cat and in my advertising crew shooting lifestyles stuff and also for stock photography and then for teaching purposes. I’ve tried to photograph cats quite a few times and unlike dogs, cats are very independent and can be really hard to photograph at all. So, to get a good shot like where you’re shooting in a way that’s technically difficult, very shallow depth of field, getting the sharpness in just the right place here and getting this incredible gesture. When I first look at this image I almost felt like I was looking at a bobcat or even a cougar, that’s tell me just an incredible gesture that tells the story of Pearl hunting here and the other thing that I loved right away about this image is just how unified it is. You know from the framing standpoint going back to shooting at F18 here not only has been turn down an incredible job of getting the eyes of Pearl and the whiskers just part of the face, the mask of the face is sharp and the way shallow depth that fill here with everything else being soft is really a simplifying the image. But it’s not just that, it’s also how the out of focus circles of light, the Boca the 518 here out F18 are creating this really beautiful pattern that creates a beautiful space, a negative space above Pearl and there was a really beautiful rhythm with all these circles and you know really was the main subject in the image. All this energy ends up here with the eyes as though they’re making us imagine whatever Pearl is stalking here in the image and the framing is really beautiful at the bottom of the image. You got this really beautiful rhyme with the grasses that rhyme, the space shape and gesture of the lower part of Pearl’s body and the legs here attaching the ground. The other thing that’s really interesting about this image and boy doesn’t make me think about the editing process is I looked at this image and there was one thing that I wanted to change pretty soon after I started looking out of this. I started thinking boy I wish that this light was more over here on the face and then I thought about a couple of other things that I like to change and did all the Photoshop work and then when I got finished with everything and I went back and looked at the original I thought wait a minute, actually the lighting is backwards here but actually goes along with what’s happening in the shot and this is what I mean. The whole concept a few sort of misdirected in a lot of aspects to look here and that Pearl is basically in the shadow. When you think about a cat sort of stalking you coming out of the shadows and surprising you and when I did my version and then came back and look at this it really hit home of how beautiful all that lighting pattern is in the context of the story. The other thing that I thought about wanting to do on most other ways to flipped the image from left to right I want to talk about more. Well, let’s just go ahead and talk about that right now. You know when I looked at this image I thought, okay I know that the left hand is out of the frame inherently has more weight because we want to start there in the west. And with all of this energy coming here and then Benjamin sort of breaking quite an important rule here and having last negative space in front of the implied image even behind. I really start to feel like I was getting damp out on the left hand side of the image and I felt like if I flipped things this part would be over here and it would really help to balance the image left or right in a way that would be more meaningful. And so I did do that work as part of the work that I’m going to show you for variation on this image. But in the same respects with the lighting has a little bit backwards here that fact that this image does sort of tip in this direction where you start here and then you’re misdirected and then it really lens in this direction, again sort of goes along with the story of being misdirected or being stalked and being surprised. And these were being the stepping part role of a sudden. This thing happens and it does tip on a direction that’s really powerful. So, mean ultimately you know looking at this image sort of teaches me something I have been taught over and over and over again and it’s not just photography, it’s all kinds of things, music, the editing process is a lot of times not very good when it’s rushed and playing around with image and letting it set and in this case also change my mind about it. I am going to go ahead and show you this other radically different version which is really more than idealized portrait and hopefully there’s some meaning in it because we’re going to talk about some design things it will maybe some Photoshop ideas that you can get out of that but to me after I spent time with this, it’s just as perfect just the way that it is. Let’s look at a variation, let’s look at a variation where we do flipped this and let’s think about the variation like this that were going more for sort of a formal portrait in this mode. If we come and we flip this, for me if I’m just thinking about this being more idealized I do actually liked the way that I move when it flip and I do feel a little bit more balance all from left to right. We love to hear your feedback about that. Let’s just flip it one more time this way and then flipping it this way. For me that left hand side does start to pull back more. I don’t feel like Pearl is nearly as close to the edge in this version and I feel like I stay with Pearl a little bit longer in this scenario. You know I talked about the lighting being backwards of this more of a portrait to get the light off for this part and I had more light to face. And so I’m just going to show you how I would go about doing that, obviously there are ton of ways to do that. I’d first come in and I would use curves to flatten this out and basically going to try to create a blank canvas where the value in here is the same as some of the values on the face. So that this doesn’t pop out as much and I want to do that by coming in and flattening out on the curve in this area and then applying that change locally staying off the areas that are already dark. So here’s one layer, where I started to that do that work and remember this is just a starting point. I know that’s hideously flat. Essentially what I’m trying to do in that area is just to make it look like that part of a Pearl’s coat is actually darker. I know the light is still hitting there and I’m going to need to bring back some local contrast. But I just want to make it look like Pearl is darker there in reflecting less light. This is what the curves looks like. You can see with those pixels are I came in and I flattened out and then this is what the mask looks like. So you can see when I applied that change locally staying off over the places they were already dark to just flatten out and I came in and I worked on that a little bit more with another curves layers same kind of idea to just flatten that area out. Then I came in and I painted the pattern that you see here and that is suggested here and here and here and here and coming down into here and here and here and here. I came in and I painted that pattern in to keep this movement going again thinking more about sort of an idealized portrait and the idea of unity and rhythm and I also on this layer did some darkening around here and so there’s the change that I made, pretty radical changes bringing some local contrast back there and this is what the mask look like. So you can see that I came in and got a real small brush and did some very specific work on that mask. Then I came in and I popped the face even a little bit more, came and did some darkening all the way around to bring Pearl forward a little bit more and then I thought you know what I’d like to light in Pearl some relative to the background and relative and particular to this area and here and then to darken a little bit like this so you’re going to see me open Pearl up. Keep it dark around here and that’s what that change looks like. Now I’m going to do two things that are pretty radical to just keep pushing this sort of an idealized portrait and this hunting mode. One of the things that’s happening right now to my eyes that this part area of Boca, this area this looks maybe like a leaf , another leaf. These things are pretty high contrast to the extent that they break up a real simple pattern down here over the grass is very simple and these are ideas are very different so it become very high contrast and these are just brighter than all the other circles of Boca back here. And it’s not only that, they’re all on a line. Remember we’ve talked about how the implied visual pathway between subjects a lot of times is even more dynamic and more virtually powerful than contouring lines. And this breaks the visual sort of implied movement. There's a change to get rid of those things and I think that we could stop right here where you know we’re talking about sort of an idealized portrait and compare this to where we started and then is ending up here and then I took it even further. I came in and grabbed this information, stretched it out a little bit and made a patch to move this negative space along like this in the background and there is that change. And I really don‘t like that anymore. Anyway, I hope this more idealized version gave you some ideas and with some fun to look at ultimately. I know this is going to seem like why did we take this journey, because it was fun, because of what Benjamin said, it’s all exciting ultimately and the editing process is sort of like when I listen to Acting Baby and I love you too and I listen to that out and for the first time I thought, what is this? And it’s now my favorite record of there’s of all time. The editing process is tricky and you need time to sort of settle in on us and I think the editing process is also never ending. You can really see that in a lot of classic photographs that had been printed and the careers of photographers over many, many years. Awesome shot from Benjamin. Huge thank you to him for sharing this shot with us and huge thank to all of you for being here and supporting the Mindful Eye and The Daily Critique.