Pet Photography - Kayleigh

Shoot 5 with Kayleigh. I'm starting to be more and more interested in pet photography, and as always Kayleigh is my model. I decided to shoot in the same location as I did for the last shoot, but use a completely different lens. I used one of my all time favourite lenses: 50mm with an aperture of 1.8. For anyone that doesn't know what aperture is, it basically means if you have a very low number, the lens is open, and a high number (eg. 22) the lens is almost closed. If you have an aperture of 1.8, whatever you focus on will be sharp, but anything surrounding your subject will be blurry, whereas with a high aperture your whole photo will be in focus. I used an aperture of 1.8 in these images, and as you can see Kayleigh's head is in focus but her body and the pillows behind her are blurry. It was quite a hard shoot because of the aperture. In a lot of my photos, her nose was completely in focus, but her eyes were out of focus!! I'll have to use an aperture of 2.8-5.6 to get a similar effect but not as extreme.

I really like how the images look, they are very different from the last shoot. Kayleigh is such a poser! But the only reason she sat so beautifully while looking at the camera is because I had a treat in my hand!

During the summer I'm going to try and have as many dog/cat photoshoots as possible and hopefully earn a bit of money. I've ordered a book called "photographing dogs" which should come next week so that'll give me some useful tips.

Pet Photography - Kayleigh

 After the shoot from the previous post, I decided I wanted to do one more photoshoot of Kayleigh before I went back to Portsmouth. As mentioned in the previous post, I really wanted to take some photos outside, so I did the next best thing - in the conservatory. The colours in there are quite neutral (other than the new carpet) but it looked great with Kayleighs ginger fur. The top right photo shows a selection of my favourite images, and the middle right and left are my two favourites out of everything. Finally the bottom right is a cheeky unedited photo of Kayleigh.

The colour combination works really well: there isn't an overpowering red sofa behind her and the background isn't too plain. The subtle orange in the pillows ad the brown of the chair match with Kayleigh. I slightly edited the photos so that Kayleigh is a bit brighter and more colourful than the chair behind her.

I decided to choose these two images as my favourites because she's looking at the camera. Although there were a few photos where she was looking away that I liked as well, I prefer the eye contact.
I'd like to do more dog photoshoots with different dogs, but that'll be a project for the summer.