Perfect pups: Dog photography 101 (part two)

By Matty Graham | 19 August 2025

This is part two of a two part series on dog photography. You can see part one, from last week, here.

Show their environment

While there’s nothing wrong with taking photos of your dog inside their house, we have to remember that these beautiful creatures were bred for the outdoors.

Selecting an environment that matches your dog’s character can help show them in their true light. From fields and forests to beaches and farmland, combine the picture-taking with a walk and hit up the great outdoors.

Getting down to your dog’s eye-level shows the world from their perspective and will always improve your results. If your dog responds to their name, let them wander off, get your camera ready and then call them back so you can capture them in motion as they race to your side. Ricoh GR II. 1/500s @ f7.1, ISO 200.

Getting low down to the ground can help enormously with composition - bringing you to the dog’s eye level rather than looking down on your subject.

Experiment with your focal lengths and compositions, using wide and telezoom lenses and also mix up your angles, capturing your dog from the front and side to bring variation to your imagery.

Canon EOS 7D, EF50mm f/1.4 USM lens. 1/125s @ f4.5, ISO 200.

Back to mono

While colour can work well and there is certainly a time and place for it, to really focus the viewer’s attention on your subject, taking a mono approach can help reveal your dog’s character.

High contrast mono frames can also help when there are differences in light levels, or with dog’s who have distracting fur patterns that may draw the viewer’s eye away from the dog’s eyes.

Canon R6, EF100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens. 1/320s @ f4.5, ISO 800.

You can use Photoshop, Lightroom or other image editing software to quickly convert your images to mono, or another option is to use the Picture Style options to shoot in-camera mono - remember to select the RAW + JPEG option so that you have your mono JPEG and the colour RAW as a backup in case you wish to transfer back to colour further down the road.

Include the owner

While it’s great to get photos of your dog, it’s also important to include other family members to show the connection between owner and dog. The aim here is to make the photos look natural and not overly awkward.

Experiment with poses that give naturally looking compositions - there’s nothing worse than a tall owner standing towering over a small dog - you get the picture.

Puppies grow by the day so capture every precious moment. Asking the owner to hold their puppy shows the difference in scale, creating an interesting juxtaposition. Why not recreate the image six months down the line to show just how much your dog has grown? Canon 90D, 50mm f1.4 lens. 1/640s @ f2, ISO 160.

Encourage the owner to hold and cuddle the dog and, once again, try to focus on eye contact with the dog. Another tip can be to ask the owner to come down to the dog’s level, by kneeing, sitting or lying down to level out the difference in height.

For new puppies, it can be fun to shoot the same photo a few weeks apart so you can illustrate the rapid growth puppies go through in their first few months.

Embrace the golden light

Just like when you’re capturing portraits of people, dog photography can benefit from warm golden hour light that occurs at dawn and dusk.

As your dog photography skills grow, try to capture ‘true’ dog behaviour. With gun dogs like this spaniel, a raised paw is a natural indication they have sensed prey and if you can combine this when showing them in a natural environment, you will be on to a winner. Olympus E-M10, 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 lens @ 42mm. 1/200s @ f5.6, ISO 400.

Low, directional light can enhance the feel of the frame and help the viewer connect with the subject so look up sunset and sunrise hours and time your photoshoots accordingly.

Remember, you can use the White Balance settings in your camera to warm up the scene, but the wiser move it to leave the enhancements until post-production where you can introduce warmth and haze to the scene. ❂