Roxy and her Puppies
So, following on from the shoot that I did with Theo and Ash was a litter shoot. The booking was to photograph Roxy the Golden Cocker Spaniel and her Puppies, all of seven of them.
Right from the outset I knew this wasn’t going to be easy as the puppies were just about to go to new homes, so I guessed that they would be between eight and ten weeks old and full of life.
Unfortunately aside from wanting individual shots of each puppy, the owner also wanted a shot of the whole litter and, ideally a shot of the whole litter and their mother, which proved as expected to be impossible!
The individual shots were not a problem, aside from the one that I created myself by allowing all of the pups the be out at the same time and then taking random shots. The photos themselves came out OK, the problem was for me to identify each puppy once I had the images in Lightroom.
What I should have done is had one puppy out at time and made a note of the number of shots that I had taken. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at least I know for next time
The image of all seven puppies at the same time proved to be easier than I first though. In short we put all of the puppies in a large plastic tote box and the shot directly down on top of them. I must say, its probably my favourite image of the day and one that I will likely use again. Note to self, I must go and buy a large clear plastic tote bin
Taking a shot of the entire litter and the mother proved, as I suspected, impossible and I never did achieve it.
I decided that I would have to so a composite edit in Photoshop, merging in a different puppy shot to one of the mother.
Well, I produced the image but personally I wasn’t happy with it. I showed it to the client who seemed more than happy with it
And said it was ideal, in fact she liked it so much that she brought it along with the litter in the box shot, as I said, it was my favourite.
It was, once again another learning curve, how best to approach different situations. So what did I learn from this shoot?
When shooting litters, get one puppy out at a time, take a load of shots and make a note of the shot number on your camera i.e. 1 - 50 = Puppy 1, 51 - 78 = Puppy 2 and so on.
If you need to do a composite shot make sure the lighting and background is the same for all of the images, my plan would have worked much better if this was case.
I think overall, I’m happy with the results, things to work on for sure but the client was happy and wrote a good Google review, which is always beneficial. I now have a further three shoots coming up, two with the Wiltshire Working Gundog Society and one with a client who has booked the The Puppy 1st Year Package, which I’m quite looking forward to doing
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