Re: Advice for starting pet portraits...lighting especially
My wife, Wendi Boden, is the photographer that Peter mentioned who photographs animals for NKLA. Her professional name is Wendi Marafino, and her website is www.wendimarafino.com.
She\'s been shooting for NKLA for a little over two years now. They originally projected around 100 animal adoptions a month, yet the number has now grown to over 300. This is an intense amount of work for her between shooting and post-processing.
Her setup is three Paul C Buff Enstein\'s with animals shot on white vinyl seamless. There are two lights for the background, bare head with grids. The key light is another with a large umbrella-shaped soft box. There are no reflectors. She originally wanted to use studio strobes, but her shooting space at NKLA is very small. Therefore, she attempted to shoot the animals with Speedlights, but quickly learned they didn\'t provide enough power and had slow recycle times. When shooting animals, she needed the light to be available immediately. Otherwise, the shot would be missed.
As Peter stated, she shoots with a Canon 5DS tethered to a MBP into Capture One. The only lens she uses for these images is a 70-200mm. She\'s not a fan of wide angle on the animals with shallow depth of field. That\'s not her style and not what NKLA wants. If I recall, she shoots at f/11, ISO 200.
She has an assistant who helps by handling the animals while shooting, and volunteers assist by exercising the dogs beforehand. Large animals are shot on the ground, and smaller animals are shot on a table. In either case, she gets down to eye level when photographing, which really helps to draw the viewer in. For each animal, she averages about 15 minutes of shooting time.
She also has a large selection of toys, squeakers, and iPhone apps to hold the animals attention. And this is in conjunction with her enthusiasm. Her goal is to capture the personality of the animals with a head shot and three additional poses of each animal.
After photographing, she spends hours in post processing to retouch, color correct, and knock the background to white. The retouching is minor, but she does clean up the dander and fly-aways. The idea is to achieve a clean, crisp image.
Here\'s a few of her recent shots. I\'m biased, but I believe she does a fantastic job! I\'m am so very proud of her that I couldn\'t help but post a message and show off some of her photos.
Feb 04, 2016 at 12:46 AM
Previous versions of Mike Boden's message #13403416 « Advice for starting pet portraits...lighting especially »
