I recently had the honor of shooting for The Discovery Channel again - this time for Animal Planet. Their annual AKC Championship Dog Show is coming up in February and they needed shots of dogs with attitude for their advertising campaign - one of the ads they are using is above. The shoot was in two parts: morning session was a NYC crew filming some on-air pieces with the Phantom (an amazing high speed video camera that shoots at 1000 frames/second -
see specs here). The stills portion (my assignment) was in the afternoon. Some of the shots are below. Six dogs were on set - one bulldog, two poodles (one black, one white), two afghans and one pomeranian. My assignment was to capture their personality either through a look, gesture, movement, etc...
I've photographed animals before and have found that it is a mixture of timing and a lot of luck. It's similar to photographing people but a lot less animated and most definitely harder to capture that decisive moment. You can't really tell a dog to "hold that pose". It's there one minute and then gone forever. So the camera is stuck to your eye for quite a while, waiting for the right expression.
All the dogs were great, but the bulldog had the most personality (both in body and expression) and gave us exactly what we were looking for - that "I don't care, just get the shot so I can get out of here" look. The poodles were very calm and all their personality shown through their eyes. Very loving animals. Photographing their "overdone hairdos" was a first for me. The Afghans were, to be honest, not that bright. Talk about dogs with ADD. They couldn't keep still, but loved the wind machine which calmed them down, somewhat... But boy could they give you that "sad eyes" look. The photo below reminds me of a painting of The Madonna from the 1500's.
If you would like to see more, there are images on my
web site under "New Work".
