In order to get the best quality pet portrait to you, it really helps to get some really great reference photos of your pet. But what makes a good reference photo?
A good quality image both has a high resolution and contains a lot of detail of your pet. Resolution is the number of pixels the image contains and the file size and type. You don’t need to worry about this too much, but if you’re saving your picture from a website like Facebook or Instagram, most likely those websites have compressed your image which will make the file size small but will also cause the image quality to be lowered. The best quality images come from a digital camera or even right off your phone!
The second important part of quality is the detail available in the photo. Details are things like the colour of your pet’s fur and the texture of it. For great detail photos, it’s better to take close up pictures of your pet. If the photo is zoomed out a lot of the important details that you’ll hope to see in your pet’s portrait might not translate well.
Below is a bad quality picture of my dog Bella vs. a good quality one.
Most of our pets are much smaller than us and we take our photos looming above them. While most of these are adorable and memorable, in order to capture the real essence of your pet it’s best to get a photo on level with them.
This can be done by crouching down or kneeling and getting close to them when taking your photos.
Some of my paintings have interesting perspectives – and that’s totally alright too! The best paintings are the ones where I don’t need to figure out a long perspective and can focus on capturing your pet as they are.
Below are some examples of a good perspective and a bad perspective of my dog Bella.
A high-quality photo is well lit. Especially with animals that have darker fur, it’s important that they get sufficient light so that I can see all their fur details.
Natural lighting is almost always the best, so outdoor pictures work great!
Indoor lighting is almost always too low for a camera to take a high-quality photo. So if you’re shooting pictures of your pets for a great picture try to get a few outside (if you can!), otherwise try to turn up the lights and get as much brightness in your room as possible.
Here are some photos of my bunny Ruby showing examples of good and bad lighting.
Excited to get your pet portrait started? If you have any questions or I can help you at all, please feel free to get in touch with me at lunahennessey@gmail.com or using the below form.
