Video: 5 tips for better studio pet portraits

If you've ever tried to photograph your pets, you know that it's not always easy to capture good portraits of your furry friends. Fortunately, professional pet photographer Adam Goldberg is here to help with five tips to help you take better pet portraits in a studio environment. By studio, we mean a controlled environment where you have artificial lighting. You don't need a complicated setup and a bunch of lights. That said, some of Goldberg's tips apply outside of that situation, too.

Goldberg's first tip is to pay close attention to catch lights. A catch light is the reflection of a light source or light modifier in a subject's eyes. It's a specular highlight that adds a lot of life and dynamism to any portrait. Depending on the size of the subject, you may need to adjust the position of lights to ensure a good, bright catch light.

Catch lights will help add 'life' to your pet portraits, and toys will help bring out your subject's personality. Goldberg's second tip is to make sure you have toys on hand, like a squeak toy, tennis ball or anything that makes noise. Squeaky toys are a great way to get a dog's attention, especially if they're toy motivated. If you have your camera in your dominant hand, you can hold a small squeak toy in the other hand to get a dog to look right at you.

Speaking of looking right at you, much like with wildlife photography, pet portrait photography is improved when you're at the same level as your subject. When photographing pets, you don't want to be staring down at them with your lens, you want to get low so that you're on their level.

To see the rest of Goldberg's pet portrait tips, watch the full video above. To see more of his work, you can visit his website and follow him on Instagram. After all, who doesn't want to see more pet portraits?

If you want to improve your pet portraiture skills further, you can check out two more videos from B&H below.

(Via B&H)