Fun pet portraits Make a home studio

Hamster whisperer Peter Travers shares his top tips for taking pet portraits with personality

NEVER work with children or animals, they say – and they are often right! But don’t let that stop you from trying this project for a fun and creative pet portrait.

We decided to photograph our little pet hamster, Cloudy, and it instantly threw up challenges – the main one being able to get a decent shot before she scurried off.

Hamsters move very quickly, and aren’t in the habit of staying still and posing in your direction; but with a few key techniques, and being ready and in position with our lights tested and set up, we were finally able to get a winning shot after using her play tube to keep her stationary for a couple of seconds before escaping.

We set up a small home studio for our small pet by sticking a piece of blue background paper to the wall and to the top of Cloudy’s cage. Then we positioned two off-camera flashguns, which we set on low power so they didn’t scare her.

Step 1

We set up a simple mini-studio by taping a piece of blue background roll to a wall and allowing it to curve gently onto our hamster’s cage to create a smooth and seamless backdrop. We then let the hamster crawl around on top of the paper. To light our hamster, we set two flashguns to a low 1/128 power: one positioned at the front at 28mm zoom, the other to the side at 50mm zoom, fired via wireless triggers. (If your camera has a pop-up flash, trigger your flashguns optically instead.)

Step 2

We used a 24-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens on our full-frame camera, focusing at 70mm to get close enough for a frame-filling composition of our little subject. For a crop-sensor camera, an 18-55mm kit lens is fine. It’s tempting to use your widest aperture for creative blur, but when focusing closely on small subjects, depth of field is extremely shallow at f/2.8; so we shot at f/5.6. Our shutter speed was 1/200 sec to meet the flash sync speed, and we set ISO 640 to boost the exposure.

Step 3

The best way to attract animals of all shapes and sizes is to bribe them with their favourite food; Cloudy loves nuts. An assistant comes in very handy here, as they can entice the pet to stay still and balance on their hind legs for a better pose. To inject some colour, we tried using a plastic green tub – which also stopped the hamster escaping! We also tried various items for our hamster to clamber over and pose on. We found that a cardboard tube was perfect to keep her facing the camera for the few seconds we needed to take our shot.