Dog/Pet Photography Using Just Your iPhone & Natural Light

1. Introduction to Class: Great job. In our development. There are quite a few dog owners. Some have even two or three dogs. And if we will be out walking our dog and we saw them, we'd stop and talk. And after awhile, I got to know quite a few of them. And I asked them if I could take a photo of their dog using just my phone. No other light modifiers. Just my phone. Hi, I'm 30. And in this class I'm going to show you how you could take beautiful dog poetry. It's using gesture phone. And this also apply. So similar paths like cats, pet pigs, monkeys, goats, anything similar? Now this is not to be confused with professional portrait or pet photography, where you really need to use special lighting to get a special look that you're after, or maybe a special background. And you definitely want to use a camera that's going to be professional enough to give you the type of image that you're looking for, whether it's mirrorless or DSLR. But in this case, I wanted to keep it simple. No additional lighting gear was used, not even the tripod mono pod or selfie stick to hold the phone, but just using a phone, handheld, not even a reflector, although I was tempted, but I decided against it. And just so I can keep it just as simple and pure as possible. And after I would take the photos, I would use the built-in app on my camera to duty editing. And if I'd do a little bit more extensive editing, I have an app on my phone that I use to do that. If I wanted to do a little bit more extensive editing or retouching, would transfer the images from my phone onto my desktop. And I would use Adobe Photoshop and do some cleanup work, some retouching there was willing to go into. And there's also a, another program that I use quite a bit. And this was very, very helpful. It just turns your photo into some neat black and white effects, brown tone, all kinds of neat effects that we're going to have a look at. So let's embark on our journey and adventure in dog and pet photography. Thank you for watching. 2. Camera & Photo Settings for iPhone: Before we go into the photos and a camera, there are a few things that I want to go over when it comes to your settings. I'm currently using an iPhone 11 Pro Max. And if you're using an Android like Samsung and Google, you're going to have to just go about it a different way. So let's just take a look at just a few of the settings that I think may be important to you. So first we're going to go to the settings, and then we'll go to photos. And on the very bottom, there's just something I want to go over where it'll say transfer to a Mac or PC. And I have my check to automatic. So what the automatic does, it just automatically transfers your photos and videos in a format that's compatible. Because some of the photos that I take with my phone, I wanna do some image editing. And I want to make sure that I can do that on my PC without having any compatibility issues. Next, we're still in settings and we're going to go to camera and up on top in formats while tap that. And here we have a choice of camera capture. We can either choose from high efficiency format or a GIF or HEVC format, which is going to give you a smaller file size or about half the file size as it would if you had most compatible checked, which is gonna give you a JPEG file. Now for quite awhile I was using most compatible because I wanted to do image editing on the desktop. So I have a transfer the images and I would end up with a J peg, and that's what I like working on. However, after doing a lot more research, I found out that the high efficiency or HEI F compression is a modern compression algorithm. It does a better job in preserving details and also gives you a smaller file size. It's going to give you a format that's going to improve the highlights and shadow details and the mid-tones. Just going to give you a more of an extended dynamic range. And it also gives you 16 bits of color, as opposed to jpegs 8 bit color profile. And you can also do nondestructive edits with this file. So in a nutshell, that's the reason that I switched to using high efficiency. And many believe it's going to be the format and the future. You're getting a smaller file size and also you're getting more information in your file. As a review, check automatic if you want to have your images automatically changed from the high efficiency to the JPEG format. And check keep originals to keep your images in the high efficiency format. Now when you transfer your images over from your phone, so your PC or portable hard drive, by using a cable, you can also ensure that you transferring over the original files. Check high efficiency to reduce your file size. And check most compatible if you want to save your images as a JPEG, even though it's going to increase your file size by about twice as much. 3. HDR - When To Use It: Next, on our settings, we're going to go down and you'll see it'll say Photo Capture. And it's going to give you a choice of turning on or off, prioritize faster shooting. Now I have mine turned off here because I want to put a higher priority on image quality than faster shooting. So that's what that means. So in my case, I have it off. And right underneath that you're going to see smart HDR. Hdr stands for a high dynamic range, and it's really good to use in most cases, when you're able to hold your camera reasonably still. Or you have a subject that's not darting all over the place, which in some cases dogs maybe doing that. So unless you're photographing a subject that's raised, nobody cell. I have mine turned off here because when you're shooting in HDR, what that does is takes cerebral images and it combines them together. It's going to give you an improvement in the highlights and the shadow details. Combine them all together For a much higher quality image. However, you may have a problem with blur because of either camera movement or your subject moving too fast. So I have mine turn off here. Now if you go into the camera, you can see just because it's turned off here, if you look on the top right, it has a line through HDR. But if I went this on, in most cases I do, I'll just tap it and a STR is now on. Okay, so let's go into our camera. 4. Why Shoot In Portrait Mode: There are certain advantages that you have when you're photographing and portrait mode. And to me, number one, the most important is that you can control your depth of field effect. You can make an adjustment as though you're shooting with a very fast lens. So it's wide open or close to wide open, which is going to give you a shallow depth of field. Now why do you want a shallow depth of field? When doing portraits, I like to isolate the subject. Meaning I want the attention to go more the subject, rather than having your eyes darting back and forth in the photograph looking for a center of interest. Where if we isolate the subject and the background out of focus, your attention is going to go more to the subject and that's what you want. So to me, that's the most important. Number 2 is that you can use your lighting effects. We'll now normally I let mine go at natural light, so I should that way because I can make my adjustments afterwards when I look at the image. And sometimes when I make the adjustments afterwards, I may use studio light. What studio lights seems to do is brighten up the facial area a little bit more. So you have a little bit more light into the face area. And this is kinda like you're adding a reflector, aiming it onto the face, putting a little bit more light into the face and to the eyes. And let's do a brief demonstration, shooting in portrait mode. 5. Shooting In Portrait Mode Demo: I put a background down which has some clouds to it so that you can see how I can knock the background out of focus. So let's go ahead and start. And we're going to bring in a little stuffed animal here. Actually, this is my my puppies stuffed animal. He said I can use it. Now, one thing that you have to remember, you have to be between 28 feet away to use portrait mode. If not, the camera's going to go back to the shooting and regular photo mode. So two to eight feet away. And first of all, you'll want to set your focus point when you can on the eyes. So let's do that. And I know many photographing doggies, they're running and jumping all over the place. It's a bit difficult, but if not, then your cameras should be able to pick up the face. But when you can, if you get a dog that's train, that's this drill. Focus on the eye closer towards the camera. And the neat thing is that if you're too close to the camera, watch what happens. It's going to tell you to move further away. So you wanna make sure that you're within that distance. So let's go ahead and focus on the eye and we're pretty much set and I'm going to keep everything else is going to be in default. I'm not going to mess with the lighting effects well. So we're going to go ahead even though it may seem like we're a little bit further away, but we have to be within that distance any closer. And I'm not going to be able to use portrait mode. So let's go ahead and take our photo. And I'm going to run through some of the editing that I would do. So let's go into the photos and we'll select that photo. And we'll go ahead and just do some of the brief editing that I would do on my phone. So the first thing up on top, you see the edit. We're going to tap that. And if you look at the color effects wheel here, you can see it was taken in natural light. And watch what happens if I bring it to studio mode. You can see how the face brightens up just a little bit, so I like that. So let's keep it in the studio light mode. Next thing I would do is I would crop it. Now I'm going to crop this into the format that it has taken on. In this particular case, this was taken in a three by four format. Now, if we crop this, whichever as far as we want to go, Notice how it's going to retain that format. So if I shot at three by four and if I go into an 8 by 10, it's very, very close to that format. And 57, It's kind of stretch it out a little more. But three by four is where I shot it. So let's just keep it there and let's crop it in just a little bit. I don't want to crop it too much because if you're going to be making a print up, you want to allow a little bit of space on the sides for your frame. Okay, so now we have it cropped. There are other adjustments that you can make when you're doing your cropping. You can do all kinds of adjustment as far as straightening goes, changing the angle. And if we tap on that, we can see in the bottom we have the scale. So there's our default pretty much. And if we adjust the scale, we can straighten the image to the way that we want. And we can do more. We can also change the perspective of it which kinda distorts it. But depending on your camera angle, you can make adjustments that way. And then here's another way that you can make adjustments. So this is kinda neat. But right now I'm going to keep it at our default setting as far as straightening goes. So let's go ahead and make a few more adjustments. And as you can see, we're back now. And if you look on the top left, you can see f, That's our aperture is add 4.5. If we tap that on the bottom, you can see a scale of adjustments that we can make. If we bring the adjustment all the way over to the right side and notice it'll say f 16. That's going to give the appearance as though it was taken with your lens closed down. So you have more of a depth of field, which means that there's going to be more that's in-focus. However, I don't like that. Look when doing portraits. Let's go the other way. If we change it all the way to our left. Notice on a background now is way out of focus and that's what I like. And if you look at the number here, it says at 1 for now that may be a little bit too much because you do have some little bit of distortion around the edges. And sometimes you have problems when shooting in portrait mode, which we're going to take a look at later. But I like to normally I'm going to keep it about two, maybe 2.52.2. Right now we're at F2 0. So now you can see that we have a focus on the subject and we have our background slightly out of focus, which brings our attention more to the subject. There's one more thing that I do quite a bit. On the bottom, we're going to tap the left-hand side more towards the center. We're going to tap on that and we have more judgments. We can make those a lot here that you can just but the camera does a pretty good job of doing the adjustments, normally of undoing a serious portrait, fine tuning everything. I'll go into Adobe Photoshop. I'll transfer this image onto my desktop and work on it that way. Right now you can see that we're on vignette. And if we move all the way over to your left, you can see that along the sides and corners we get a brightness. So it brightens up the sides and in the corners. And normally in a portrait, I'll go the other way towards the other side, which darkens the corners. Sometimes I'll keep it all the way at a 100 percent, and other times maybe just a little. So let's go, let's go to about here. So now that you can see that if we keep it the way it is, we have our vignetting down or a cropping done. And now our attention goes more to the face and to the puppy instead of darting all over. In case you do have a busy background and sending your background out of focus as a big advantage. So let's take a look at some of the photos that we took of our doggies. And we'll do some enhancements in portrait mode. 6. Image Editing On Your Phone: So let's go ahead and we're gonna do some retouching or enhancement on this image here. This was taken right from the camera. We haven't done any editing on it yet. So let's go ahead and use our default editor for this. So first thing I wanted to do is click on the top right edit, and then let's crop it for. So on the bottom right we have our cropping tool will tap that. And when I crop it, I'm going to keep it in the same format as it was taken in. So up on top here, I'm going to tap our choice of formats. And I'm going to go ahead over. It was taken in three by four. So we'll tap that. And now as we crop, it's going to keep that format. So let's bring it in little bit. And we can just use our fingers to pinch also. Bringing in just a little closer here. Okay, Let's just keep it as it is. So now we have the cropping done. But let's go back to our, on the left side here we have this wheel that we can choose natural light, studio light. Now sometimes I'll use studio light and it just seems to brighten up. The shadow area may be a little bit more. In this case, let's just keep it as studio light. And next I'm going to tap on the top left we have our f-stop number, and this was taken in f 4.5 mode. So let's tap on that. And on the bottom we have our adjustment that we can do. And this gives the appearance of being taken in a really small aperture. So we get more depth of field and watch what happens now as I slide over to a larger aperture, which is going to open up our lens more. And it's going to give us a shallower depth of field so we can see how the background goes out of focus more. So sometimes not so plus, there are certain things that you have to watch for this, which we'll go into later. But for now, let's keep it at F2. So now we have a cropping and then we have our depth control added. Let's do one more thing to it. I'm going to tap on the adjustment here towards the bottom left. And we're going to go all the way over to vignette. And here we can dark in the edge. So if you look at the adjustment on the bottom, we can slide it one way, it darkens it. We can slide it another way, it will lighten it. So let's slide it all the way over to the right. And we can see it's dark and I'm going to bring it up to right about here. Now we have our sides and the edges dark and just a little bit. And you can see our attention goes more to the dog. Now. Next we're going to hit Done. Okay, so now we have this finished in our default editor. However, I want to remove our leash that we can see on our left side. And there's also a tree in the back That's a little distracting. And it just takes a couple seconds to fix that. So let's go ahead and I'm going to make a duplicate of this image. So we're going to go ahead down to where it says Duplicate. Okay, so now we have this duplicated. And now I'm going to go into one of my other favorite editing programs and that's called Snapseed. And if I tap on that, we're going to open up our images. And from here, I'm going to choose open from device. And here we asked to go to the album that we say the then, and of course it was reset. And the image that I saved was this one here. So let's go ahead and use a tool. We'll click on Tools. And it's called healing. And this is similar to the Healing Brush or the clone tool in Photoshop. So let's click on that. And now we have access to the healing tool. So I'm going to enlarge the image. We're going to take it up quite a bit. And on the bottom left here you can see we have a little section that allows us to move the image around so we can magnify it and move it to exactly where we wanted so we can work on it. So we're going to use our fingers and we're going to just paint away the leash here. And we'll move it over a little bit so we can get the rest of the leash. So this is pretty simple. It's just, we're just taking our fingers and just dabbing on the leash area. And then think now we pretty much had the leash out of the way. So you can just fine tune this to your taste. And let's go up to where that tree was, which is right here. And we're all the way on the end here. So again, just using our fingers, we're going to just add this. Now of course, the more you do this, the better you're going to get at it. But in my case, I'm way more familiar with using Photoshop. So to me, photoshop is a little bit more accurate because I'm looking at a larger monitor and I've just gotten so used to it. But if you practice using this, you're going to get better and better at it. So this is just a way that you can do your retouching or some enhancement using gesture phone. Okay, so now we've finished up on this reattaching. We did by removing our leash and the tree section in the background. And we're going to click on the low checkmark on the bottom right. Okay, and there's our image and this is what we have and this will be our final image of how we have everything done on the phone right here. And then we can save this. Now I do recommend when you save a, you go to export. I do recommend that you save it as a copy. This way you're not going to be losing the original image and all the information on that. So let's go ahead and save a copy. And there it is, You can see it is successfully saved. And that's pretty much how easy it is to do your enhancing or some retouching using just your phone. So let's take it one step further. In the next segment, we're going to take a look at more retouching possibilities that you can do on your desktop, that you might not be able to do easily on the phone. So let's take a look at that. 7. More Advanced Image Editing Possibilities: With programs like Adobe Photoshop, you can take an image like this taken right out of the phone, but with a little bit of cropping, we came up with this and of course I removed the lashes and I was also able to bring him a little bit closer together. And of course, I added a vignette to the sides of the photo. And one day when we were out walking our dog, we came across these three little doggies, cutest little things. And right away I call them the three amigos. They were Carlos, Eddie, and Tina, beautiful dogs. And when I first saw my each gave him a little bit of a kibble and ever since then, every time they would see me often a distance, they would get all excited and they pull the to come over and see me. I guess that means they really like me or is it the food on a given them? But anyway, they were beautiful dogs. And here of course we were out on the pavement walking. And these dogs are quite active and they're usually running and twisting their leashes all over the place. But here I was able to get them looking towards me just for a few seconds. So I was able to get this image. And again, using Adobe Photoshop, I was able to remove the leashes, crop a little bit closer. And of course I added a little bit of a vignette. And many times I like to remove a color or a halter from the doggies. And it's really not all that complicated. And here we have GGG, a beautiful dog. We were able to get her in a pine straw. Unfortunately, we have a little bit of a background issue up on top. We have a light area mixed in with a darker brown and it's sort of distracting. So this is a simple fix. Just adding more of the background into that last area. We were able to come up with this photograph here, and it doesn't take all that much time to do that. But notice how this photo is so much more pleasing because your tension now goes to GG instead of being distracted by the lighter background and up on top. So here we are, add on a tennis court and bear comes along and we have a little bit of clutter. We had the gate up on top, and of course you can see bears leaf held by the owner, but the leash here is in a good spot, easy to retouch out. So he came up with this photo here of bare. And then right after Bear left, another one of my friends came over and I photographed this dog, another beautiful dog. She's very active, but we were able to get this photo here. And leash here was at a good spot behind a dog running off to the side, which is easy to fix. However, here we have again a cut-off of the background. So we had to fill that in. And that's also a nice effects, as you can see here. And if the blue is a little bit distracting for you, here, I made it into a black and white where there's just a little hint of a brown town. Here we have little Jak standing in the pine straw. And here you can see that the lesion is in front of his body. So we have to work a little bit harder getting rid of the leash. Because ideally again, I like having a leash coming from behind the body and active side, which makes it a little bit quicker for retouching. And here we have some debris on the ground that I got rid of like a stone and some twigs. And after a little bit of a clean up and getting rid of the leash. And here's the final image of little Jack. I liked the way he tilted his head after I made a little bit of a sound to get his attention. And a leash removal from the back. Here's something that I have to bring out by. This could be a problem that you may run into when you're shooting in portrait mode. And you're adjusting your image using depth control. Sometimes little areas next to that dog, maybe between a year and his head or body. There's a little space here. We have a little space from the background to the top of his head that when we made the adjustment, the rest of the background when softly out of focus. However, this section, it didn't have any effect. So there's two remedies to fix this. Number 1, you can adjust your lens opening so the background is more uniform in its focus. However, then you get a miss out on some of the DDI focus on the background, which I really like. And the other way that you can fix that is just simply using a program like Adobe Photoshop and the clone of section from somewhere else in the photo onto this area just takes a few seconds and then you have that taken care of. Here's a photo of King. If you look between the area of his ear and his neck, we had the same problem that the background didn't go out of focus. And that's section like it did in the rest of the photo. So again, we had the choice of changing our aperture. Sona background is not a focus as much or we just do a simple enhancement or read touching that area just takes a few seconds to do. And that's what we did here. And that also a little bit of clean up on the background. Kings owner was holding the leash on the proper side. It's not coming across his body. So it's a lot easier retouching out to this leash. And here's our final image of King. Just a few seconds of work as we got rid of the leash, cleaned up the background just a little bit. And we fixed our problem that we had with our depth control when shooting in portrait mode. So Photoshop or another similar program is really no substitute for getting it right in the camera when you can't. Now, if I were to schedule these portraits, I would use a location that has scattered out earlier of certain time of the day so I can get the best lighting that I'm looking for. So that would give me an advantage. Even if I was doing these in his studio, inside a camera room would have more control. I would have my background. I'll set up the way I want it. I wouldn't have to worry about a leash or the dog owner can remove their halter or color if you wanted to. And this way I wouldn't have to worry about getting rid of all the little minor details that came up during the taking of these photos. However, keep in mind, we were just walking about. No extra lighting, no assistance, no other gear. Just simple. You could say snapshots that you could turn into beautiful images. After it's all said and done. 8. Adobe Photoshop Image Editing Demo: So the first thing I'm gonna do is open up the app that I have on my desktop to one that I use to transfer images both from and to the phone. And my favorite app for doing this is called photo transfer app. It's a quick way of transferring these images. And then also once I'm done with the image, I can transfer it back to the phone if I wanted to. One thing I want to bring up though, is once you make changes to this image, in programs like Adobe Photoshop, you're going to lose so many options that you may have to do image editing on the phone. Like, I'm not going to be able to do any depth control or the lighting effects, wheels going to be gone. So on her phone, we're going to find the image that we wanted to transfer over to the desktop. And then we're going to tap on the up arrow. And then we're going to choose what we want to do with this image and that edge. We're going to use the photo transfer app to transfer over. So we're going to tap the photo transfer app and it's going to be searching for devices. We're going to go back to the desktop and we're going to tap discover devices. And it finds our phone. And then the image that we selected comes up. And we're going to select that image. We're gonna go to Download. And then we can download this image, whatever folder we want to. And we'll tap on that folder. And then it'll tell you when it's done and just tap. Okay. And then now we can go into that image. So now I'm going to use a photo viewer called AC, DC to find the image. So here's our image, and I'm going to use a shortcut to transfer this to Adobe Photoshop. And the shortcut is Control Shift X. So now we have this image transferred into Adobe Photoshop. And I'm using an older version here, CS5. And if you are going to be doing a lot of Photoshop work, I recommend that you might want to take a look at and sign up with Adobe Creative Cloud. There's all different Adobe products that you can sign up with. Photoshop is one of them. Lightroom, so many other ones. However, you have a monthly fee when you use that, but it gives you all the latest updates and there are some other advantages. But if you want to use a program that you pay for just once, then I recommend you take a look at Adobe Photoshop Elements. Their newest version is fantastic, and it has what they call guided edits. And in there you can actually remove a dog's leash, collar. Their halter is really amazing and you could do this very, very quickly and it's simple. So let's get started and looking at our image, we can see we have a problem with the area by the ear where we don't have the background blur like we do in the rest of the background. So there's several different ways you can do this. We can use the clone stamp tool, which I use quite a bit. And we can also use the healing brush. We can Laszlo just the area that we want to work on. So as we bring up the Lasso Tool, the shortcut will be L. And then you can set your feathering, which is going to depend on your image size. So right now with our size image, we're gonna set it to 17. And when you do your image editing, Allen recommend that you take the image up to at least a 100 percent. Sometimes if we're working on a fine detail, you might have to go a little bit more. So we'll keep it at a 100 percent. So I'm going to select this area. So now that we have the area selected, we're going to bring up the rubber stamp tool. The shortcut will be S, as in Sam. And then we can also adjust the opacity. Here. I believe we have it set for 87% and a flow. We'll just leave it there at about 90 percent. And if you're not that familiar with Adobe Photoshop, I really recommend that you take a course in it. You don't have to learn everything about it, but just some of the things that you need to use for your image editing. So we're going to use the cloning tool and we're going to select from an area that we're going to clone into that area that we have selected. And then we can just clone in that area that we want to blur. Control D, D selects that. So that's a pretty good start. And then we're going to reduce the size of the brush. And we're going to go into the little areas and we'll start cloning in there. So it looks finished and you'll never see that there's ever anything wrong with it. So you get the idea. And Jack is an older dog, so I want to clean up a little bit around the mouth, some spots there. And once you start using Photoshop more, you're going to find that you're going to get really good at certain things. So we're going to fast forward as we work on a leash. Okay, so we started with our original image and then we did some retouching using our phone app. And then we transfer it over to our desktop using Adobe Photoshop. And then after we got rid of the leash and a halter, here's our final image. And since I'm using an older version, using something new or like Photoshop Elements. With that neat guided edit app that's included, you can do this type of retouching and enhancement really quickly. So Adobe Photoshop elements might be something worth looking into. So how much retouching should you do? Well, it has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And if you're working with clients and they ordered a photograph, then as a Great Dane Collins uses say, beauty is any eye of a checkbook holder. So you wanna make sure that you give them an image that they're going to be really pleased with. So you're going to have to decide how much retouching is enough until you get to kind of image that pleases you. 9. Outdoor Lighting & Backgrounds: Let's take a look at outdoor lighting and backgrounds. First of all, you want to make sure that you have enough light reaching the dog? I tried photographing one of the dogs at nighttime using just a street lamp light that was available. And just using the regular automatic iPhone built into camera app, some of the images were a little bit blurry because of v, The camera movement or the subject, a doggy was moving. So we've got some blurry images to make sure you have enough light that's hitting the dog. Rule number one. Number two, try to avoid direct sunlight because you may get a problem with a lot of harsh lighting and dark shadows. And it's not going to be too attractive in most cases unless you're going for something very dramatic. But I tried to look for either open shade or shade underneath the tree, like in this case here, we have GG under a tree in the shade. But in the shade though you do get nice even lighting. And of course pay attention to your background. Now many times as I'm walking around, I didn't have the perfect background. But I looked around and nervous a spot that was nearby, maybe under a tree and a shade. We would move over to that area. And another of GG and a shade. And then here I've twitchy. We're out in the open shade. We're getting shade from one of the buildings that we were in there. And here you'll notice we have light coming in from the back side, just giving a little bit more shape and dimension to the subject here. So I always try to look for that. Make sure you have enough light coming in from the front and if possible, look for light coming in from the back. So it just gives you a little bit of highlight, maybe in like a rim light or a highlight, just adding more dimension to your photo. And here's an interesting area that we've found of Annie under a tree with little sun highlights coming in between the leaves and all. And I tried to make sure that she was in a shaded area. This could be kind of interesting if you find an area in open shade, but then you have some sunspots coming in between the leaves. And there's another. And looking back at this photo, this could have been improved, possibly with a reflector reflecting more light into the eyes or a weak flash fill. A flash fill is just flashed going off where it's not really overpowering your subject, not casting any additional shadows, but just opening up the dark areas. And like I mentioned before, putting a catch light into the eyes. And here's halo in the same area, same spot. You can see the little sunspots and back that she's in a shade. Same area again. And here's bear on that tennis court. And this is the shaded area, but you can see a little bit of back light coming in and giving a little bit more dimension. And that's what I tried to look for. And same tennis court and here we're in the shade, so it's really soft lighting. And again, here's what I look for. This is in the pond area when I would find a certain area that a lag, whether I'm photographing dogs or maybe an engagement in portrait or family portrait, I would find a certain area and now would remember those spots and that would go back there. Well, that was the case here. I've found this spot there over by the pond with the lighting was really beautiful. Light coming in again from the top back a little bit, giving a little bit of highlight. And then of course we have an open sky coming in from the front. So we get enough light coming on to it or dog from the front. And here's Abby turning her head more into a profile. So we get a nice backlighting effect. Sometimes it's called rim light. Where we get light that's lighting the outside of the features. And this is especially nice for profiles. And here we're in a shade under a tree, nice soft lighting. Again, in a shade under trees of little Jack. And we're back to the pond area. Notice we have again that back lighting coming in giving nice highlights to the features. And this is a different area of the pond. Probably have a nice background here in addition to nice lighting coming in. Now the background, what I look for is a nice background that's not too distracting yet, has some pleasing qualities to it. It's a nice texture to it. And in most cases I want to blur the background out so your attention goes more to the dog here. This is king. And in addition to the front lighting coming in on King, we have a little bit of light coming in from the side as well. And this is a nice effects with a beautiful background that's attractive but not overpowering. I tried to look for backgrounds that aren't too distracting or overpowering. But we had the attention go more to the subject. 10. Beware of the Dog: Dogs or amazing, beautiful creatures, but also very smart. And you gotta watch them. Sometimes you may be photographing them either towards the beginning or in the middle. They've had enough and they lay down on you or they'll turn their heads and bodies away from yeah. Sometimes I'll even turn their backside, Anya. At times you'll get funny expressions. They may even stick their tongue out at you. And then when you have a mall rate of photograph, they give you a funny look like, What's this? What am I doing here? Hurry up, take the picture. So with a little bit of a whistle or a squeaky toy, you can get their attention just for a second or two. And then you take the photo and they may smile at you. And then after awhile they've had enough for you. So they get up and start to walk away. And again, they'll turn their backs on you. Yes, doggies are amazing, beautiful creatures. 11. Another Amazing Phone App: In this lesson, I wanted to go over the third important phone app that you can use. We've already talked about the first two. The first one was photo transfer app. This is an app that I use when I transfer my images from the phone to a PC. In case you wanna do more image editing on your desktop where you can fine tune things even more. And that was photo transfer app. And I talked about that earlier where you can actually send your images to your PC or vice versa. When you're all done during your image editing, you could send it back to your phone. So this is really a cool app. I use this quite a bit for when you want to transfer your image wirelessly. Great app. The second important app for your phone, of course, was Snapseed. And I also did a short demo on using Snapseed. And there's one more that I want to mention, which is really, really important and amazing app. And I just started using this. It's called focus FOR ceos. And when you go into it, of course, you select the image that you want to work on. I'm going to select this doggy photo here. This is pretty much as he came out of the camera. I think I may have cropped it just a little bit, but there's no artwork or any kind of image editing done on this photo. But I do want to show you what this app is capable of. This is similar to when you're shooting in portrait mode. However, it offers more possibilities. I just recently got this app. In fact, just this morning, I ordered the pro version, which I believe is 1299. But you could do quite a bit with a free version of it. One of the reasons that I did purchase the the pro version was because it allows you to save to a full res file. And there's other reasons too, but this is well-worth it. This is probably one of the most amazing apps I've seen. So let's just look at it. Like I said, I'm fairly new at it. So I'm not able to give you a real good demo, but I just want to show you a little bit and what it's capable of doing. So as we look at this image here, and this is pretty much the way it came from the camera, taken in portrait mode. So at this app allows you to do is change your degree of focus. Okay, just as an example here I'm going to tap on that little star tool. And notice here that we can do adjustments here it'll say front bulk. And here we can adjust the area that's going to be a little bit out of focus. You can see we can even add it onto the dog here if we want to. But I'm going to keep it a little bit in the foreground here. And notice also it says backbone. Okay, well we can adjust the amount of focus on the background. So I'm going to take the area that's out-of-focus off the dog a more into the background. And you can also adjust your degree of blur in the background. Let's take this down so we get the effect of an aperture that's very small lens opening and that's going to be at 20. Now watch what happens. We get a large depth of field, meaning that we have more the area that's going to be in focus. But it kinda looks like a snapshot, doesn't it? Where everything is in focus your eyes thought all over. So it's really not too attractive. So here we can adjust. If we adjust the slider, Washington happens if I bring it all the way over, it's going to give you a similar effect that you would get if you were using inexpensive fast lens. So here we are set to F1 point for. Now let's just take it down because sometimes we have little bit of problems around the edges of the dog. So I'm going to take it down to about, let's say F2. So now we have nice background blur. And if we set our focus point on the dog's eye area, then you can also make your focus that adjustments here, what you want in and out of focus. And I can set the focus point here also by tapping on the area that I want to get in focus. Like I said, I'm learning this app as I go along when I find it fantastic. And you can take it even further. You can choose the shape of the bowl, okay, which is a shape of your background. And here we have basic. Now watch out his changes. We have basic. And there'll be going the classic, we have a few settings. Each one just slightly different, pretty neat. And also if we go to lens, we can also get different effects from using different lenses. Pretty awesome. And also amazing if you wanted to, however, in this photo, It's not necessary. But if I wanted to add a light to this, see, now we have a three-dimensional image here. So we can saw, let's say we want to add a light, so we're going to click on New Light. And let's say we want to add a soft box. And we tap on it and I can bring a soft box over to the side. And by tapping on it, I can adjust the direction that the light's coming from. And I can even put it on the background of I want it to. Now of course I wouldn't wanna do it on this picture. I tried it. And it's really not necessary, but there's other cases where you might want to add something neat. So this app can be very useful, especially if you're, your phone doesn't have the portrait mode capability. But this offers even more than that. And it's very similar given year phone, the effect of a high end, either digital SLR or mirrorless camera with an expensive fast lens on it. Truly an amazing app. Definitely check this out. Unfortunately, it's just made for your iPhone or your iPad. But there are other apps that you can get for your Android if you have one. I haven't used any other focus apps except I was doing a little bit or reserved and I came across something called DP th. And this also allows you to change your depth and you're, you're focusing range. You can make adjustments to the blur of your background by using this app, DP, th. So I did want to add this app to one as definitely worth mentioning, because I think it's got all kinds of possibilities for you. 12. Use This to Enhance & Customize Your Photos: Another amazing image editing software program that I want to talk about is called smart photo editor. I really loved this program. There are just so many options that you can use to enhance your photo. Sum can be a little bit corny, maybe taken in too far, but some are very, very useful. If you wanna do a quick black and white, you can choose from all different tones, warm or black and white, cool tones. You can even do colored tones like sepia. You can do a blue tone. When you first go in their program, you can see that you have thousands of choices that you can choose from. Or if you go to the left of it, you have different selections that you can choose from. You can choose from color, whether it's black and white, like I mentioned, or sepia, blue tone, all different color choices. You can add different styles of effects to your image. Whether you want to add a border or a vignette, you can adjust them. You can actually combine effects to really amazing. I really enjoy using those programs allow foreign 2 plus you can get some really neat effects that might save you time. That might take a little bit longer. And doing in Photoshop, you can go through all the effects that you can choose from to add to your font. All very, very amazing program, smart photo editor. 13. Final Thoughts & Advice: So before I close, I'd like to, first of all, thank you for taking this class, and I sincerely hope that it's helped you. And I also want to mention that I think that 10 photography has a really good opportunity for someone to start a part-time business doing pet photography. It's sort of like wedding photography. You can become a specialist in that field. And I think you have that opportunity to just about every time I do a family portrait, now bring along their pet, and it's usually a dog. So especially down here, dogs are a big part of somebody's life. And if you're going to be starting doing this instead of doing it all outdoors, I would recommend if you're serious about it in your home or office, if you're just starting out, have like a certain room that you can use. Maybe set up a couple of different stations background so you can do different things with a dog. And this way you're not just limited to to time a year, the time of day, and even the weather. You can control the whole situation. You control the lighting also. And this way you're able to get consistent results over and over again. So for those that are interested, I would definitely check into that. And the other thing is that I would like to give you your next mission. Should you decide to accept it. And I know you well, if you're serious about doing pet photography, I like to have you ask either a family member or friend that has a dog or a cat if you could photograph them. But I will go out and scout your locations ahead of time and also the time of day. Just utilizing the things that you learned in the class so you can take advantage of all the elements out there. And then after you photograph it, do some image editing on your phone like cropping and maybe cleaning up the background a little bit. And then if he had the opportunity, upload that image onto your PC or your Mac and try doing some little bit more advanced image editing and see what you come up with. I would love to see what you come up with. I think it's got great potential and taking great images even with just your phone. And of course, if you are more serious than it now you might want to consider moving up to a good DSLR or a good mirrorless. So with that said, I'd like to wish you all the best. Thank you again. And until we meet again.