Video: Beautiful dog portraits with natural and studio light

In response to multiple requests from MasteringPortraitPhotography.com subscribers, we’ve created a video showing you how Paul captures his famous dog portraits. Paul’s expertise in canine photography stems from his ten years’ experience as lead photographer for the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. In this role, Paul has taken hundreds of thousands of images of puppies and older dogs, as each of the charity’s hearing animals passes through the charity’s training process. JOIN NOW to view this and hundreds of articles, videos, …

Aiming For The Lens

My high risk strategy for getting young James to look directly down my camera lens (and why safer alternatives are a good bet for engaging portraits, too) To get this shot, I challenged James to throw one of his marbles and land it inside my lens hood. He thought this was very funny and set about the task with enthusiasm. This gave me plenty of opportunities to capture the right moment just as a marble went airborne. I happily acknowledge …

Creating Hero Portraits

Using a low camera angle to make your subject the ‘hero’ in your portraits, and underexposing a bright sky for a more moody and atmospheric background. When shooting on location, I look to re-create the lighting patterns and posing shapes I work with in the studio. Here, I positioned two portable flash heads in the same way I’d position lights back in the studio when creating a ‘hero’ shot. I’ve arranged the stances of Kieran, Tom and Evan to give …