Surrey Fine Art Pet and Animal Photography Interview at Mirrorlessons

I’m sometimes asked to be the subject of editorial features and magazine interviews (some of which you can see on our Press page) and it seems that animal photography is finally starting to become more popular on this side of the pond. Photographers are finally breaking away from the staid and formulaic posed (and sometimes cheesy) studio shots which are often associated with pet and animal portraiture. My approach is to capture animals in their own environment wherever possible, be it the great outdoors or their own home or back yard. For my fine art studies I’m able to find locations where I can create my trademark dark backgrounds.

I do think that animal photography is one of the most challenging genres, and certainly one of the most frustrating. We can’t always communicate particularly well with our subjects so we have to rely on creative composition, distractions, timing, and a dose of luck. Chances are we are also going to be relying on the weather, and we can’t always choose the right time of day either. This tends to mean that good animal photographs often happen by chance, or else we may spend weeks trying to get a good shot of a particular subject. Where human beings are concerned it’s blissfully easy by comparison – we can normally just tell them what to do and then refine things a bit to suit our tastes.

But I will say this – animals can be an awful lot of fun to photograph and if you’re not tearing your hair out in frustration then chances are you will be laughing much of the time. I’ve had very few bad experiences with furry or feathered subjects – bad behaviour often amounts to things being stolen out of my camera bag when I’m not looking (I had an otter take a lens brush once) and on one occasion I had a reflector wrenched from my hands (I’m guessing the culprit thought it was a giant Frisbee).

I was asked some really good questions by Heather at Mirrorlessons and if you’d like to hear about my approach to animal portraiture then please click on the following link: Surrey Fine Art Pet and Animal Photography