Animal Shelter Photography 101
During 2020, there was an explosion of pet adoptions and purchases when many people found themselves socially isolated and in need of companionship. Though remote work is still more common that it was in the previous decade, many of these paw-rents found themselves returning to the office in the past few years and unable to cope with the responsibilities of pet parentage. This unfortunate reality has meant that animal rescues and shelters have been operating over-capacity for the past several years, with no sign of slowing down. There are ways to help, from donations, volunteerism, adoption, and advocacy. One of these volunteer opportunities is taking photos.
How Photographs Make a Difference
The very first thing that a potential adopter when they’re looking for an animal is the photo. A high-quality adoption photo can reduce the average length-of-stay of an animal by up to 67%. Another way to think about this figure is that good photos can increase effective kennel space by up to 3x. Instead of building a three times larger facility with a proportional increase in staffing and utilities, which is impossible due to lack of resources for these groups, good photography can accomplish the same and be done with your phone! All you need to do is learn a little bit about exposure and composition.
Exposure Basics
Photographs are created when light hits the sensor of a camera. The amount of light available is the biggest determining factor of how much information that sensor is able to capture. More light=more information and generally leads to a better image. Several elements control how the light actually hits the sensor, these are the lens, shutter, and aperture.
DC-Based Photographer Maya Fiellin of Maya Fiellin Photography
The lens focuses the light onto the sensor and gives the image a lot of its characteristics, on a cell phone in particular, you may have a few lenses, a telephoto, a regular, and an ultrawide are some of the most common additions to the camera array currently. These are characteristics of the glass that focus light onto a sensor in a specific arrangement to achieve a field-of-view. On the phone this is the “zoom.” Optical zoom physically moves the glass in a lens (or changes the lens) to achieve a specific field-of-view while using the full sensor. Digital zoom is the same as cropping or only using part of the sensor. As a general rule, digital zoom should be avoided because it’s easy to reframe an image later with a crop. To know if your phone is using a digital or optical zoom, usually there’ll be a .5x, 1x, and 3x option (or something similar) in your native camera app, those will pick the lens for that level of optical zoom, everything between or beyond is a digital zoom.
The shutter covers and uncovers the sensor to create an exposure. This is how the photograph is actually captured. The length of time that the shutter allows the sensor to be exposed for is referred to as the “shutter speed.” Faster shutter speeds reduce motion blur, but also reduce the amount of light that the sensor is receiving. Phone cameras usually slow down the shutter speed when faced with poor lighting, which is why photos in low-lighting usually come out blurry. For a less blurry photo, just add light!
The aperture ring on a camera (often made up of multiple blades) will open to allow more light in and close to allow less in, much like the iris of the human eye. Un-intuitively, the more open the aperture is, the blurry the foreground and background of an image will be. This blurriness is associated with professional cameras and is replicated by “portrait mode” on the iPhone as well, you may hear it called “bokeh.” The in-focus portion of the image is often referred to as the “depth of field” or the “focal plane.”
In pet photography, the primary setting is shutter speed because motion blur cannot be fixed easily in post-processing. In order to achieve a high shutter speed on your phone, add more light. The easiest place to add light, is outdoors. Even a cloudy day is 80-100x brighter than what we perceive as a "well-lit” room. We don’t generally notice because our brains are very good at adapting, but our cameras did not come with the same software as us.
Aperture is the secondary setting, but that does not mean that it is unimportant! Often a fast moving subject may be heading straight towards the camera. The combination of the long body and speed mean that a deeper focal plane will result in more of the subject actually being in focus. Because of the lack of control of a phones “portrait mode,” this can result in parts of the subject being out of focus and I’d generally discourage it for that reason.
Composing the Shot
Professional photographer Maya Fiellin demonstrating the first rule of Pet Photography: get low!
Two types of photos generally look good for animals: full body, or head and chest. Avoid cutting off parts of the legs as this creates a feeling of unease and just generally makes the photo look less professional. Taking a photo at or below the animals eye-level will also improve the quality of the photo since this is a less common perspective.
People look first at the eyes, it’s how we connect with each other and we do the same with animals. Getting an animal to look straight down the lens can be tricky, but patience and creativity can get you there. Start by building trust, assess the animals behavior and see if it’ll take treats from you, play with a toy, or otherwise interact with you. If the animal is a bit timid, go slowly and let them come to you on their terms. Once you have the animals trust, you can step back, squat down, and get the photo, using strange noises, toys, or treats to get their attention. Make sure you align the attention-grabbing action with the lens and be ready! Many animals will lose interest after the first or second attempt.
The final step to a good composition is watching your backgrounds. Bright colors, trashcans, colors, etc all make for an unpleasing background. Find a blank wall or some bushes to really level-up your photos!
Editing the Product
You don’t need to be a world-class editor to achieve a good photo. Most phone cameras take a great snapshot without any help, but it would be foolish to not take advantage of their awesome computing capabilities! When you’ve taken the photo, open up the edit menu and simply hit the magic wand that says “auto” before you send it out. Most of the time, this will dramatically improve the image with very little effort. If you’re brave, explore the other settings such as exposure, crop, saturation, and vibrance and play around with the sliders to taste. Before you finalize your image, step away for a few minutes and come back to, you may find that your eyes have adjusted and that the edit has been over or under done when you spend too long staring at it.
Promote the Animal
Now that the image is improved, make sure it gets where it needs to go. Congratulations, your photo may have saved up to two additional animals! Not a bad way to spend your free time right? Now let’s go get some more!
