Unleashed Photography Workshop – Part I

One of the ways that photographers learn and expand their photography knowledge is to attend workshops.  I have had a very busy spring and have been fortunate to attend two fabulous workshops.  In April I traveled to Dallas to attend  Unleashed | fine art pet photography workshops given by three well known photographers in the pet industry:  Barbara Breitsmaeter of Barbara Breitsameter Photography in Chicago. Pet Portraiture., Bev Hollis of “Dog Photography Bev Hollis, Pet Photography, VA, MD, Washington, DC” and Teresa Berg of Teresa Berg Photography for Maternity portraits, Newborn and Baby photography, Children and Dog photography in Dallas, McKinney, Frisco, Plano, TX.  The workshop was held at Teresa’s studio in Plano, Texas.

A group of about 20 photographers from all over the US and Canada spent two and a half days learning as much as we could absorb about all aspects of dog photography from shooting to the business end!  It was a fabulous experience and I came home energized and ready to grow my business.  This group of photographers has also provided a wonderful network of information and discussion, as many of us have remained in contact.

The actual photography part of the workshop was broken into two sections.  For the ‘on location’ section,   Bev took half the class to a nearby greenbelt to practice shooting three dogs. One of the techniques that she taught is referred to as shooting from the hip.  The plan is hold your camera at low levels and shoot up at the subject.  With a dog, this is definitely below the hip level.  You shoot with a fairly wide angle and count on your auto focus and just shoot.  Once you get the hang of that, you start moving with the dog.  It definitely creates some fun and unique images!

We then moved on to using natural light and discussed the use of different backgrounds.  We remained in one small area, but were able to achieve several completely different looks!

For this image, we moved Zoe next to this beautiful brick wall.

At this point, we started losing our light, so it was time to practice with lighting.  In this shot, we used one off camera flash in a softbox to get this beautiful soft light!

Our three awesome models were provided by Robin Ashman-Terrell of Good Dog Fetch

In my next post, I will share the ‘In Studio Session’!