Squirrel!!!!
I was contacted by one of my favourite clients a month or so ago and asked if I would take some pet pictures of their stunning Pointer breed dogs, mother and daughter Imola and Monza. It’s a bit of a change to the product and car photography I show, but they are great people so I said "sure" 🙂
We discussed the details on what the images were for (a large high-key print/canvas) and I suggested we also did some shots of them just being dogs and playing in the local park as a nice contrast to the posed shots. Everything was set and so we watched the weather and a couple of weeks later the conditions turned to our favour.
I rolled up outside the house with Prabha (girlfriend and pooch fanatic) as my assistant and a 1/2 sized studio setup in the boot. For the ‘studio’ style shots there was just enough room to set up a small backlit background and train, a front light plus a little ‘CallumW special‘ to crisp them up a little 😉
The stage was set.
There’s an old saying never to work with kids or animals, but I have to say that both pooches were extremely well behaved. They were easily transfixed with the promise of biscuits and "coochycoos" from both their owner and Prabha.
Both of them were so well behaved and so adorable, I think Prabha was eyeing one of my bags to see if she could smuggle one of them home (just kidding :))After the formal setup we headed to the park to let them loose.
A short while back I blogged about the JDM Drift cars that I photographed sliding past at speed, but seriously, they have nothing on these guys. Man these dogs are faaaast.
‘meep! meep!’ … blink …. you’ve missed them.
Needless to say there were a few shots where they were flying out of frame before I could track them. So quick … and unpredictable. At least cars follow the track (usually) and are consistent in speed.
These guys … forget it 😀
After a short time (but not before they both went for a swim in the lake) the light began dropping which meant I was struggling to keep the shutter speed up high enough, so we got them to pose for us in a few remaining pools of light to add some variety in style.
We headed back and I packed up my mini studio and we said our farewells.
Both pooches were wiped out from all the running, but you could see they had a great day.If that’s a dog’s life then where do I sign 🙂
A few semi-edited shots below so you can see how adorable they are 🙂
Recent Tearsheet
Just a quick blog entry today to show a recent tearsheet.
Bigger version is here (for the pixel peepers).Single set-up, but I still needed to do a little magic thanks to the black bottle with silver moths/text on the Vodka. There’s a different version in my online portfolio, but this was the one selected by the AD
The power of a professional image
I’ve created this post to illustrate how we can’t help transferring our feelings of the quality of an image onto the person or product that’s in the image. And as a direct result this will influence the interest that we have in that person or product.
We can’t escape that engrained part of our nature that, in the first 5 seconds, we will have assessed and judged a subject by it’s appearance and a lot of our following attitude to the person/product will have been decided in that 5 seconds.
During a recent conversation, I was asked whether or not it was worth having a professional picture of themself to use on websites, email, business cards and other marketing materials?
My reaction to that is of course "Yes", but they suggested that existing snapshots from a recent holiday or wedding should suffice?
While the holiday/wedding snapshot may be free, what image will they really be portraying?
Poor Quality? Slapdash? Cheap?….. none of which you want potential clients or contacts to associate when they think of you or your product.If you look at successful people or companies, you’ll see a common trend in that they only have quality images representing either themselves or their product or service. As an example, some companies invest tens of millions of dollars in advertising every year just to encourage us drink their brand of fizzy pop.
It’s nothing to do with ego or pride, they just know that people instantly judge by image quality.
So, an example.
If you were attending a business seminar or looking for a professional service from someone and you see a flyer or promotional email or poster with the following images … which person would you instinctively want to listen to or hire?
It’s the same girl in both pictures, but we all expect the person conveyed in the image on the right will be the one that will give us the quality service we want. You may think that it’s an extreme example, but it’s not. You’ll be surprised the number of images you see around that are like the one on the left.
But the good news is that it doesn’t actually cost much to get a professional image and therefore you can be 3 steps ahead of your competition.
If money is super tight then you could still book a photographer for a session, but by sharing the session time with a few friends or colleagues you’ll find that it’s much more affordable. The photographer won’t mind sharing and in fact they’ll probably encourage it.
