Take a picture of your pet. Five advises for pet-photographers

3 min read
24 October 2016

Everybody knows that Instagram is invented for pictures of coffee, legs and cats. But if people manage to take pretty good pictures of coffee and legs, there are some problems with animals’ pictures.

We gathered five advices that can help improve the quality of pet-photos.

1. Don’t fill the entire frame with the animal

IPhone has a wide-angle camera. It means that the objects on the photo seem wide. That works both for people and pets.

Stand a couple of steps back from the cat and take a picture. It will make him look slim, not just a furry spot on a picture.

2. Show movement

Most of the time the animal rests: it is sleeping or simply lying lazy. There is nothing interesting in it. If a person has a cat, he or she can spend hours watching it sleeping without Instagram.

To stand out from others, take a picture of how the pet is moving. A dog jumping, a bird flying, a cat playing – those are not very frequent moments. And they make us smile.

3. Take series of photos

It’s not very easy to take a good picture of an animal from the first attempt. Random pictures turn out to be usual chronicles of their lives; it could be interesting only to the account owner and a couple of his friends.

Think about series of pictures starring your pet. For instance, take photos of your cat in the bed or your dog with its favorite toy in different places of the city.

Find inspiration in the account of Ana Yukhtina and her “legendary cats”.

4. Give the animal human characteristics

We always give human characteristics to animals: we talk to them, we praise them, and sometimes we even argue with them. Many people treat their favorite pets like children.

It is great to “humanize” your pet it the picture. But you should be careful with that. A cat wearing a bow tie or a dog behind the wheel look dumb. But a dog that shares an ice cream with a human or screws up its eyes watching a butterfly, this what makes us smile.

Famous Theron Humphrey is a master of “humanizing” his dog Maggy. By the way, not everybody knows that the most famous Instagram dog was adopted from a shelter.

5. Use correct hashtags

There are 108 millions of photos with #dog hashtag and 94 millions of photos with #cat hashtag. Tags #kitty, #mycat and thousands of similar tags are filled with pictures. Nobody looks through them.

Chose less tired tags with photos that aren´t measured in thousands and tens of thousands. We suggest take a look at the tags with breeds. For instance, #abyssiniancat has only 50 thousand pictures. People who love Abyssinian cats more likely will look through this tag and you get your picture noticed more quickly.

Also consider the tag #weeklyfluff by Instagram. The social network encourages to post pets pictures with this tags. Every week they announce the best photos.