Photographing Spaniels

We, the assorted children and the people they married, are making a photobook for my father-in-law’s birthday. I thought that for the end covers we could have a pictures of his beloved springer spaniels, one dog at the front paper and the other at the end.

Anyone thinking about that much quoted maxim: Never work with children or animals?

Having spun some story about how I needed pictures of the dogs to test some post processing idea of mine I drove up to their house with:

One 3mx4m muslin backdrop and supports
Three speedlights
One Lastolite Ezybox
One silver umbrella
Stands
85mm and 50mm f1.8
Elinchrom Skyports

The plan (from back to front):

Back drop lit by an SB24
A dog
Softbox and SB900 to camera left, silver umbrella and SB-26 to camera right
D700 on tripod.

My first problem was that the dogs associate my wife and I with walks, big long walks in the woods with rabbits, deer and exciting things like that, so sitting still for me was not on the agenda.

I used a handy teddy bear as a test subject, sorting out my flash settings and taking a test shot with a white card in so I could set the white balance in Lightroom afterwards. I also changed down to the 50mm since 85mm left me too far from the dogs if I wanted to fit all the dog in the view finder.

Then the fun started. The little bitch (in the female sense) would not come upstairs – each time I came close she rolled over, wriggled and begged for a tummy rub. Finally I grabbed a handful of lamb flavoured biscuits from the kitchen and bribed her. Once on the back drop she was fairly easy since all she did was lit down in the hop of a tummy rub.

The dog however likes to be close. He usually sits right next to your for attention, food, slobbering….In his case we did a lot of practice for “sit, stay, wait” and then “down, stay, wait”. My supplies of lamb biscuits dwindled. In the end we had a big game of wrestling on the backdrop where I would get him into a position, grab the camera, shoot 3 frames, bribe him and then we’d wrestle into the next position.

Finally we reached his boredom threshold and the shoot was over.