Photo Guide
I work directly from reference photos. The higher the quality and more detailed the better. Ideally, we want the photos to be taken under natural light showing your pets true colours, the glint in their eye, direction of their fur and the texture of their nose. These are the details we’re after.
Phones these days take pretty high-quality shots. So, taking a photo on portrait mode in a well-lit area (preferably outdoors) will usually get the detail we need.
If your beloved pet is no longer with us please email me your favourite photos you have and together we can choose the best photos to work with. We can pick up details in other photos to bring it all together.
Below are examples of reference photos and how I work with them to compose the portrait.
Single Pose Photo
This is Yoshi, he’s big on adventchaaa and a huge believer in selfcare. He knows when to give himself permission to take the day off and soak up the sun. (Although, he’s probably right under a vent and enjoying the dump of warm air from the central heating). This makes a great reference photo. It’s a clean and crisp high-quality photo taken under natural lighting with great contrast. We can see the true colour of his coat, his whiskers are sharp and the direction of his fur (even the un-lickable bit under his chin) is clear. There is plenty of detail to work with
(Photo taken by Thomas Schilling)
This is also Yoshi. Totally different vibe here. His pose is questionable. There’s plenty of light but the quality of the photo isn’t high enough to capture the detail we need. Very tricky to draw from. .
Merging of more than one photo
If you want a particular pose and you aren’t able to get everything in one shot, you can take several photos and we can work on the composition. This is Bobby when he was a kitten. Super curious and inquisitive, his eyes say it all. The first photo had the detail i wanted. His face is evenly lit and his paws close together. In the second photo we have full ears and I liked how his left paw sat under his chin. Bobby’s portrait was a combination of these two photos.
Perfect pose but the photo is blurry
This is Marmite ‘Marmypants’ he lives in London and he has a huge feather boa fetish. This photo captures what he’s all about and what he lives for! He has also just discovered that he is being watched! This is a great reference photo for capturing the moment but it isn’t very clear. What do we do? We gather lots of other reference photos and piece together the bits of detail we need. From the photos below we can get a bit more whisker definition on his upper lip, fur direction on his paw and detail of white fur on his ears.
This is the only photo I have
In some cases it’s hard to get your hands on high quality photos with the lighting and detail we need. For example this is Moody. At the time she was a mystery pup. I didn’t know anything about her and her portrait was to be a surprise gift for a friend of a friend of a friend!
This makes it tricky but with the help of photo editing programs like pixelmator, photoshop or even just the editing features on your phone, to some extent we can adjust the lighting and contrast levels to get the detail we need. It’s a bit of extra work but it’s possible.
