Three Donkeys, a Child, and a Retired Flight Attendant…

12/10/09 – Rebecca Getsfrid – Commercial and Family Portrait Photographer in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon

…walk into a bar.

An hour later a photographer walks out telling you never to work with animals ever again.

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I like to plan my shots. I spend a lot of time (relatively) figuring out how I want to light a situation, what’s best going to suit everything in the frame. Today’s shoot went more like this:

1. Set up lights in a position that will be generally acceptable.
2. Tell people where to try to keep their heads facing.
3. Bring in animals.
4. Click the shutter every time the lights refresh and pray to god something looks good.
5. ?????
6. Profit.

Honestly, for a few of the poses, we never actually reached step 6.

Animals just make things crazy. I had to do my best to recover a lot of highlights, since donkeys would all of a sudden walk closer to the light, and I couldn’t risk missing a great expression from the kid. In retrospect, I should have shot everything a stop down and raised it in post.

The other thing I never realized is that horses are REALLY REALLY BIG. They asked to get some shots of the grandkid riding bareback on one of them. This kid was about the size of the horse’s liver. I had no idea how to frame it, and nothing was behaving properly, and I just couldn’t get them a great shot of it.

Thankfully, some of the poses did turn out fantastic.

This is not fantastic. This is one of the “ok it works” shots that you sometimes have to accept when dealing with an entire zoo. You can’t see all of them here because they were all over the place, but when put together we had two adults, one child, three donkeys, two horses, and 3 dogs. For this shot we had a softbox high camera left, and a bare 7″ reflector far camera right, parallel to the wall between the horses and everything else.



This shot, taken outside the barn, has the softbox high camera right, and I CTOd the reflector flash to get a look similar to a tungsten light fixture hanging on wall.



This one’s in the same place, only I moved 90 degrees to the left to get that nice cowboy sunset. The CTOd flash stayed in the same place, but we brought the softbox around. If it weren’t for the bit of box in his glasses and that green thing in the corner, this shot would have been my favorite of the day.



Instead the honor goes to this one. All the lighting technique and camera skill in the world isn’t going to beat a great moment. And THIS… is a great moment. We’ve got a softbox straight out from the horse’s nose and the CTO’d reflector is still camera left against the wall. The warmth of it combined with the cooler softbox flash makes for a pretty convincing sun.