Animal and Pet Photography Tips

Photography today is not limited to people as subjects. Today, more and more brands in the pet industry are using animals, mainly pets in their materials. Royal Canin the expert in pet nutrition, recently updated its content with new photos, mainly of dogs and cats posing for its brand. The whole pet photography had been a great experience for the team of photographers and for the pets and pet owners too.

Animal and Pet Photography

What works well when photographing people is not so easy with animals: dogs, cats, horses or rabbits don’t stand out nicely in the light and pose for an excellent shot. But that is precisely why animal photography is a special and popular field in which to learn to capture the fast movements of animal friends with the camera. We would like to use our knowledge to give you tips and tricks for this. Whether photographing your own pet or a wild animal: in addition to patience and a feeling for the right perspective, the equipment also plays a role.

Photography in the wild – the right camera equipment

While domestic animals such as dogs and cats can be photographed over and over again in their own four walls, animals in nature are photographed that move and are therefore usually only available as a great motif for a moment. A certain basic technical equipment is required for successful recordings: With a telephoto lens, you can take better animal photos and also take photographs of animals at a greater distance. A built-in image stabilizer or, even better, a (monopod) tripod prevents the camera from shaky recordings. Because with larger focal lengths, you can use a tripod or stabilizer to make up a few f-stops when taking photos. Wherever this is not possible, you should increase the light sensitivity (ISO value) of your camera and thus choose shorter exposure times for the picture.

Photographing birds in flight require a particularly good eye and quick reactions. But don’t worry: With digital photography, you can set your camera to “continuous fire” when learning animal photography so that you don’t miss the right moment. Missed pictures can then be deleted immediately on the camera. Another tip: Activate the follow-up focus, so the probability of getting a great picture of the animal increases.

Animal photography tips

Especially when photographing wild animals, a long focal length is often crucial so that the shy animals do not flee before they can even be photographed. Basically, when photographing animals in the wild, it is advisable to first take another picture section to ensure that the subject is also in the picture. This is how you can best use the centrally oriented focus points. You can choose the final cut afterward on the photo and crop it with an image editing program.

There is another trick to bold expression in wildlife photography. The formula here is eye to eye. This means that as a photographer you construct your image of the animal like a portrait of a person by positioning the camera at eye level with the animal and blurring the background.

Great photos of wild animals in the zoo

In our latitudes, we do not come across exotic four-legged friends such as lions, rhinos, or bears when photographing nature. But you can still take beautiful photos of big and small animals in the zoo. Here, too, it is best to work with a telephoto lens, since of course, you cannot get very close to the animals. Also, ask about feeding times so that you can photograph the animals in action. The bars are obviously distracting, so try to take your picture through them, or choose a small f-number so that the aperture opens up and creates a bokeh effect, blurring everything around the focus point, including the bars.

At the zoo, you also have the opportunity to photograph the animals with different lighting conditions simply by being there at different times. Find the right exposure for the most beautiful pictures in the zoo, whether at dusk or in the midday sun.

Macro photography: Small animals, big

If you would like to capture butterflies, insects, caterpillars, or beetles in a photo, you should know that a macro lens is better suited for this, because conventional lenses usually only achieve a scale of 1:7 to 1:10 in the image. In macro photography, on the other hand, the scale is between 1:4 and 1:1. And another tip: For sharp images, it is best to use a small aperture with a longer exposure time. It, therefore, makes sense to photograph the multilegged creatures with a tripod.