Natural Light For Pet photo sessions

Want to use natural light instead of all the production with strobes or hot incandescents? This is ideal for a sunny day or even a bright cloudy day. Position your doggie by a window that has a curtain or white sheet to soften the direct sun. That way you won't get any contrast light and a lot of deep shadows.

Use a reflecting surface to lighten the side of your dogs head opposite to the window. In this photo, the reflecting surface on the left side of the photo is just outside the view of the camera.

You can get different effects depending on the reflecting surface you use. You can use a mirror also or even colored paper for other effects.

In this photo of Maggie, the window was on the right. I also used Photoshop to enhance the catchlights in Maggie's eyes.

What are catchlights?

These are the white dots in the eyes that are an indication of the light source used for the photo unless they are added as I did here. They are caused by reflections on the eyes surface from the light used to make the photo. For indoor photos, they mimic the sun.

They are almost always present in fine portraiture, advertising photos, film and video. If you study photos of models in magazines adds, you can get a hint as to what kind of lighting set up was used, providing the photos were not retouched at all. Usually the cheaper the ad, the less post-production retouching went into the photo. If you see two or maybe three catchlights in the eyes then that's how many strobes or lights were used. I used poetic license in placing the catchlights in the center of Maggie's eyes to give her a more penetrating look. I should have placed them slightly to the right.

More about catchlights.

Catchlights can also be found in the paintings of great masters. If you're painting or adding catchlights to the eyes of the model you must make sure they they are correctly placed. They must obey the laws of physics and optics. At the DeYoung Art Museum in San Francisco, there exists a portrait done by a famous artist who painted in catchlights on his subject's eyes but incorrectly placed them relative to the shadows on the subjects face. I don't want to name the artist because it might embarrass the artist. Well, he's dead anyway but the curators of the museum might think differently about exhibiting works by an artist who didn't know about the laws of light!

Still More About Catchlights

One of my photography teachers, Zev Pressman, used to be a staff photographer for Life Magazine. Zev told me that if they had a photograph of someone that lacked catchlights, they would be added later. They would take a print without the catchlights and use a pin to dig into the print's surface in the subjects eyes until some of the print's white backing was exposed in both eyes. The print would then copied to produce a negative with catchlights which would then be reprinted.

Special Effects

Zev also told the tale that as a wedding photographer at one point in his career if they needed a soft focus lens effect of the bride, he would stick his finger in a piece of the wedding cake and smear the cake icing on the protective lens filter of the camera.

You can do the same technique to produce artsy photos by using a silk stocking over the lens to get a soft or foggy image. Can also use water soluble gel. Dont use icing from a cake or your dog will want to lick the filter (that you surely have in place to protect the lens surface). If fido licks the filter, you could produce a new genre of photography. Think about it.