BAUFOTO - Dog Photo Stories Chapter 4: "Amy" (+ photo-technique explanation)

Welcome back to BAUFOTO dog-photo storyes

This time I will also try to concentrate on the technicals aspect about the how the photos were shot.

Amy is a 8 months old French Bulldog (well she's actually a big girl now since I took the photos more than a year ago).
She was the second dog that I ever photographed in the studio and she taught me a very important lesson - if you are going to shoot both outdoor and studio - first shoot outdoor.
That way the dog will get tired from playing outside and be more relaxed and collaborative in the studio :) ....you never stop learning.

So here's our photo-adventure, hope you enjoy it.


Lets Start with the studio shots:

First a few closeup portraits. I really love how close-up dog portraits express a huge amount of personality.

The lighting was simplye - a 50x50cm softbox with a speedlight in it on a boom, directly overheading Amy (classic beauty/paramount/butterfly lighting). I used a cheap Yongnuo 560 flash (recycles much faster than my nikon SB800) with the yongnuo triggers.
Nikon D7100, Sigma 50-150 f/2.8 shot at probably something like f/9 - would have had the exact same result with a cheap camera and a kit lens - once you have all that flash power you can shoot at low ISO and closed aperture - so it really doesn't matter - thats why I absolutely LOVE SPEEDLIGHTS - crazy value for a super-small investment.

After this i wanted to try something more dramatic, so i gave her human friend (I don't remember his name unfortunately) the softbox and asked him to follow her around the studio (he was a voice-activated light stand :) ). Needless to say: because of the fact that when shooting off-camera flash you are shooting without TTL, because of the INVERSE SQUARE LAW (go google it), you have a relatively narrow interval of distances between your light source and your subject to avoid over/under-exposure.
So there were quite a few badly exposed shots - but hey it's digital and it doesn't cost me anything, right?

I really love the dramatic look of theese shots, she almost looks like some kind of superhero :)

Back to some "normaly-lit", full-body shots:

To the park!

At the park it was all much more spontaneous, her running aroung and me running around her - cant get too fat with this job, thats for sure :)
I was using my Sigma 50-150 for the whole time (like I do 90% of the time when shooting outdoors), since the park we were in wasnt that beautiful, I was trying to keep my aperture as low as possible - everything was shot between f/2.8 and f/3.5

You know they say that dogs quite often look similar to their owners? I think this is a good example....but other people told me it really isn't, what do you guys think?

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I'm a photographer living in Padua, Italy specialized in photographing dogs, my dog photography project is called BAUFOTO (Italian dogs go "bau" instead of "woof" :) )
I have photographed over a 100 dogs and in the next weeks I would like to introduce you to them by posting every week a short story about one of them accompanied with a few photos, so if you think it could be interesting for you feel free to follow me :)