Molly Blue Natural light

Good morning, its a new month and its going to be another warm day here in the UK. Last year September I got to Molly and her brother Alfie together for a shoot. I wanted to try a little natural light set up. This was just a test shoot in my back garden, I wanted to keep this simple as working with dogs anything can happen. I had a piece of backdrop that I was going to throw out and thought I would take it home and have some fun with some test shots.

The set was simple, I used a table (to keep Molly in one place) I placed the backdrop behind the table she was about 80cm from the backdrop. Nothing fancy, I used a Sky blue paper backdrop I bought from Creativity Backgrounds  I had this from a previous shoot I did. I love working with this colour it also converts nicely to black and white. It creates an smooth grey just lighter than 50% grey. 

Here is a image straight from the camera. You can see the setup I used. Just simple paper backdrop a stand with two clamps. You can see the creases in the paper as this was just a cut off from the larger roll.

A few things I learnt from this test shoot: 

Make sure you have dogs that are mellow or have been walked - these two had too much energy and I had to shoot them each individually. To be honest I only had a few minutes per dog. I was also shooting alone, I would suggest having an assistant to help with treats and keeping order.

I took these early evening, around 6;00pm, the lighting is great in September in the UK. I did under expose a little because the doggies were grey and I wanted to keep the detail. All image were shot in RAW. I will try to use a tripod next time, but I don't really like using one shooting dogs as I like to move around when I shoot so I can get the various angle I am always looking for when I shoot. I will shoot at a higher shutter speed as I did get a few images that had a slight blur.

The Lenses I used:

I use a Sigma 2.8 70-200mm zoom lens. This lens is great and allows the flexibility of zooming in and  out. Useing it at 2.8 does give great seperation of subject form background, this lens can be a little soft at times. I also used my Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro lens, one of my favourite lenses for detail.

Love this one of Alfie, he is one handsome doggie ! Of course Molly is in the background.

This is one of my favourites from this session of Molly, I love the "Magic" in this image it has feeling too ! I will be doing another shoot soon with more of Molly's friends - watch this space !

You can follow Molly on Instagram #mollytales