Dog portraits taken in my Centurion studio – centrally located for both Johannesburg and Pretoria clients
Like all hard working craftspeople, I spend a lot of time photographing other people’s dogs, but rarely find the time to photograph my own. Over the Christmas holidays, for a bit of fun, I took my dogs and a tub of peanut butter into the studio to create some new portraits.
My dogs love to hang out in my studio, it’s where I have my desk and do my editing, so I’m always surrounded by them when I’m doing computer work, but they also know that if I have my camera in hand, there’s likely to be treats. If the door is closed, they form a very disorderly queue outside to get in.
Armed with peanut butter a high speed sync flash setting on my camera and my Godox AD300 studio strobe, I let the dogs in, one at a time. There was great excitement, followed by a lot of licking and quite a spectacular mess.
I managed to capture some more conventional portraits of the dogs in between the very animated and slightly perplexed excitement too.
Victoria wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole situation.
Jane threw some of her usual elegance in between frenzied lip licking.
Ziggy was a champ as usual and posed like the pro that she is (you might have spotted Ziggy in the latest Woolies pet range ad doing the rounds on social media currently…).
Crazy as she is, Ziggy has been quite the muse for my dog portrait photography.
With the exception of Jane, the other hounds featured here were all adopted from CLAW (Community Led Animal Welfare). Dora (above) has been with me since March 2011 and Edward (below) has been a household favourite since October 2016.
I loved shooting this collection of studio portraits of my dogs so much, that over the weekend of 12th & 13th February, I’m opening the studio for a limited number of mini dog studio shoots. I’m all about sharing the love, so I’ll be donating R250 from each shoot booked to CLAW.
Mini shoots start at R1250 for one dog including a fine art print. Simply get in touch with me here or pop me an email to book – emma@emmaobrien.com