Photography News

You close the car door, and then it hits you like a stealthy ton of bricks: silence. I don't know about you, but for me, when I am in the throes of such profound silence, an unacknowledged sense of anxiety starts to creep in. It is the undeniable truth that, even with a camera in hand, I am alone. 

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Cinematic photos are not built on color grading or exotic lenses. They hinge on light, depth, and a clear subject, and once you see how those pieces work together, you start spotting them everywhere. 

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A modern camera can handle extreme dynamic range at sunset, but the camera alone will not build the image. In a place like Fjordland National Park, light moves fast, and composition decisions matter more than gear. 

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A black-and-white portrait full of detail has been chosen as this week's featured image. Simply titled 'Lizzy', Hudson_Swan presents a photo with a blurred outdoor backdrop that frames her naturally. The patterned scarf, fur-trimmed coat and long wavy hair create strong textures that work well together. Lizzy rests her cheek in her hand and looks straight into the lens, giving the portrait a relaxed and natural feel. A really lovely portrait and a well deserved spot as this week's featured image.

Every Photo of the Week (POTW) winner will be rewarded with a Samsung 128GB PRO Plus microSDXC memory card with SD adapter, providing top-tier storage for all your creative needs across multiple devices. But that's not all! In January 2027, we’ll crown our 2026 Photo of the Year winner, who will take home the ultimate prize of a Samsung Portable 1TB SSD T7 Shield, courtesy of Samsung. It’s time to shoot, submit, and showcase your best work for a chance to win these incredible rewards!

Modern cameras deliver images that are almost too perfect. Sharp edge to edge, clean color, flawless focus. That level of polish can leave photos feeling sterile when what you want is something human. 

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The freedom of shooting thousands upon thousands of photographs on a single shoot or photo trip is a huge benefit of digital capture. That’s all very well but at some point you’ll need to trawl through your shots and find your ‘keepers’, organise them into collections, add keywords and delete the dross. That’s a job that can easily soak up hours and even days in front of a monitor and any technology that can ease the burden is very welcome. 

Excire Foto 2025, a software available for Mac and Windows, could be the answer. It’s an asset management program and has no editing capabilities but it can manage and organise your photo collection very quickly.

 

Navigating around Excire Foto 2025 is simple thanks to its clean interface and you get tooltips while hovering over each icon. Not having any editing functionality must help to keep the interface fuss-free.

 

Quick Verdict

It might be stating the obvious, but any piece of kit, be it a lens, filter or software, is only worth having if it plays a useful role in your photography. In respect of Excire Foto 2025, for productive photographers, being able to quickly and accurately search for pictures in a very large image collection is invaluable. Yes, it’s a serious investment but it is a one-off cost with the potential of saving you lots of time.

If you’re a frugal shooter with a disciplined shutter finger, Excire Foto 2025 might not be for you. But for photographers who like to keep their camera busy and shoot a broad range of subject matter, especially people and events but also nature and scenics, this amazing software is very effective. The ability to quickly search for images in many ways without having to keyword or rate them beforehand is a huge benefit.

Is Excire Foto 2025 worth the money? Well, that’s a question only you can answer but there’s no denying that it’s an excellent, very capable product worth trying.

 

+ Pros

• Fast, even with huge image collections
• Face and people search
• Easy to use
• Text prompt search works well
• Auto keywording is especially useful for people shots
• AI-assisted culling
• Outright purchase, no subscription
• Works for stills and video
• Excire runs locally – images aren’t sent into the cloud for analysis so there’s complete privacy
• Video playback possible directly from the preview

- Cons

• £199 / $229 is a significant investment
• Importing big photo collections takes time but it’s a one-time job
• Auto keywording can be less effective for non-people photos
• Aesthetic rating might not appeal to everyone
• Auto advance after image rating would be nice

 

 

Excire in its product range offers AI-powered image management software. Tested here is Excire Foto 2025, a standalone app with AI and traditional organising features. It should be stressed that Excire doesn’t have any editing tools, so in your workflow it complements rather than replaces your usual editing software. 

For those photographers with an Adobe Lightroom Classic based workflow, Excire does have a solution specifically for you. Excire Search 2026 works as a plug-in so meshes seamlessly with Lightroom Classic and has most of the features seen in Excire Foto 2025. 

Excire Foto 2025 and Excire Search 2026 sell for £199 / $229 each and that is for an outright purchase – there is no subscription model. Both apps come in a bundle price of £299 / $299 and are available on a free 14-day trial.

The top filter bar provides a selection of search and view options including metadata, capture time and Excire’s Aesthetics rating.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Getting started

Open up Excire Foto 2025 and you’re presented with a series of welcome screens that you can turn off. After that, you’ll see a cleanly laid out interface that is organised into sections. Image thumbnails are shown in the central area, and the size of previews can be varied to suit. Double-clicking on a thumbnail shows a larger preview that you can view at 1:1 or zoom into up to 500% for an even closer look. There’s also the option to compare two images. 

In individual image mode, images can be rated either with stars and colours which mirrors what Lightroom offers. Indeed, the same keys are used for rating (i.e. 1-5 for stars, 6-9 for colours). Also, it’s the same if you want to delete a photo (X), deselect an image (U), show the grid/gallery view (G) or go full screen (F).

In my case, where I used a collection of pictures already managed by Lightroom, existing star and colour ratings show up in Excire.

The left column is for folder navigation. There’s an option to show folders in a timeline and a search results palette where you can revisit previous searches. The fourth icon here is for image culling, which we’ll delve further into later.

Across in the top bar is a selection of filters and you can search by relevance, Excire’s Aesthetics rating, keyword metadata with parameters including camera used, ISO and shutter speed.

In the top corner of the right panel sit the search tools and immediately below are four palette options showing metadata, faces, keywords and general which includes the image’s histogram and information which includes file details. 

Shown enlarged here is the panel of Excire’s search tools. Across the top row (from left to right): Text prompt, Find duplicate, Find by GPS, Find by keyword. Across the bottom: Find faces, Find people, Find similar photos.

 

Excire Photo 2025 Ease of use

During installation, Excire asks where you want to install the default database which includes thumbnails, preview images and the program cache. The database will increase in size over time as images are added, so choose a hard disk with plenty of free space. In my workflow, Lightroom catalogues are kept on a separate 2TB NVMe SSD drive in a fan-cooled enclosure connected to the computer’s Thunderbolt 4 port, so I used this drive for my Excire database. For information, for this test I used a M2 Max Mac Studio 32GB RAM running Tahoe 26.2. 

Excire says it’s perfectly feasible to have a single database managing your entire image collection even if you have hundreds of thousands of high resolution Raws. 

That said, it depends how you like to work. For example, if you take on freelance commissions, you could have separate databases for personal and paid work. As part of my test I made several databases and moved them around with no problem.

Before importing your first images, you need to check the initial settings. Go to Excire Foto>Settings>Preferences to bring up a series of options. So, for example, if you want to add PSD files, the option in the Add menu must be selected. In Previews, the size of previews can be changed and if you want to work with 1:1 previews. In Metadata, you can choose to import existing keywords into Excire Foto.

Excire’s quick start guide walks you through the many options and it’s important to give the settings a few minutes of attention.

A prompt search for images with a full moon revealed this candid. You can see in the enlarged panel other keywords applied by Excire Foto 2025.

 

Excire Foto 2025 key features 

• Only available with a lifetime licence, no subscription option
• Range of search tools: Text prompt, duplicate, GPS, people, face, keyword,
• Organising tools: AI keywording, duplicate search, face-tagging
• AI-assisted culling module
• Stills and video compatible
• Intelligent face-sharpness detection
• AI Aesthetic scores
• AI-powered video management 
• High-speed preview rendering
• Supports Raw, PSD, JPEG files and more
• Available for Mac and Windows

 

Images imported into Excire Foto 25 go through a five-step process with images analyzed and keyworded so it takes time, but it only needs doing once. With big image collections, leave the software running overnight.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Performance

It’s while adding the images to Excire Foto 2025 that the magic happens when the images are analyzed and tagged by AI. To benefit from Excire’s skills, make sure the Analyze photos option is switched on in the Add Folders dialogue box.

The import process comprises five stages: Preparing, Adding folders, Finding photos, Registering Photos and Analyzing. The process is seamless so you don’t have to do anything during import and it’s the last two stages that take time.

I started with a new shoot. With 3377 50-megapixel images (1007 JPEGs, 2370 Raws) the adding process took just under 12 minutes.  Next, it was the turn of 37,966 images (25,927 Raws, 12,039 JPEGs) from a recent trip. This lot took just under two hours to initialise in Excire. 

My third test was going to be more strenuous. Excire suggests that adding large photo collections should be done overnight and that is advice worth heeding. I imported six years' worth of images, mostly Raws (in-camera and DNG) but also TIFs, PSDs and JPEGs. In bare figures, the 135,813 files amounted to 4.66TB so this was a serious task. The import process took precisely five hours, 49 minutes and 30 seconds. Before you think that I stayed next to the computer with a stopwatch in hand, I’ll come clean: you get a status report (see above) at the end of the adding process. 

The next evening, I added another year’s worth of photos which again took close to six hours taking the whole database to 259,280 photos. 

Adding photos is slow but this only applies at the beginning of your relationship with Excire and once you have your archive initialised, adding shoots as you go doesn’t take long at all.

 

In the Find by text prompt panel (enlarged here for better visibility) just tap in what you’re looking for. Your search could be for a specific subject or you might be after images that show a particular mood or emotion. Here, I was after ‘reflections’ and Excire found 3930 images.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Finding images

With images loaded, it was time to try the various search aids. I started with the Find by text prompt. Here you type in what you are looking for and you have options to limit how many images are shown and something called distance limit which defines how strict you want the search to be. 

This search is performed with the help of AI and is not keyword related. My large photo collection has been managed by Lightroom Classic with keywords limited to location, species and camera technique but no more.

In Excire, I tried words such as ‘tranquillity’ and ‘flight’ plus phrases such as ‘images that show happiness’. I also tried more descriptive searches such as ‘images with a full moon’, ‘calm water’, and ‘city skyline’ as well as locations. It was interesting in my London search that Excire included a red tram photo taken in Hong Kong, so I assume AI saw a red bus-like vehicle and assumed it was a London bus. It did, however, correctly identify 3926 London shots including infrared Raws.

For ‘flight’ I ended up with 2539 images featuring insects, birds and airplanes. For the ‘moon’ search, 715 images were found and while most were of the full moon, I got also a few crescent moons and a couple of sunsets. What impressed, though, was that the search was largely accurate and included images where the moon was veiled by cloud or even if it was small in the frame. The search process was really fast too, typically taking less than ten seconds, which is incredible with a database of over 250,000 photos.

The Find by text search is cool and works impressively. The ability to make searches for specific subjects is great but to make conversational searches adds an extra dimension. 

With the Find Faces command, you get a dialogue box with quite a few options. So you could decide, for example, to search for a child, male and smiling. My collection of pictures included lots of family snaps so a search using those criteria found 375 shots, mostly of my great nephew so that worked.

 

In the Find People dialogue box, you can choose facial properties – smile or not, eyes open or shut – plus you can limit how many pictures you want to see and how ‘strict’ or ‘loose’ you want Excire to be in the search.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Find People

With the Find People tool, start by picking an image that includes your search subject. As I had a shot of my great nephew on-screen I used that and Excire found 151 images with a very high success rate.

That was a simple search, but the Excire Find People tool goes much deeper. First thing to stress is that Excire works locally, i.e. with connected hard drives, and nothing is uploaded so there is no risk regarding privacy.

The Find People tool uses the latest facial recognition technology. Using the Find People icon in the search panel is one way to access the dialogue panel but hover over an image and an icon appears top right that has the same job.

Next, choose where you want Excire to look (the whole collection or a specific folder), limit how many images you want to see and how exact (strict) or broad (loose) you want the search to be. You can also search by keyword or without keyword so that the found images can then have a keyword added.

With the search done, check the results. There is a Zoom faces option in the right panel or just hover on the thumbnail for a zoomed in view. Clicking on an image in gallery view also shows a head only preview in the right-side panel and here you can add the subject’s name for future reference.

If your found person is in a group, the AI technology will show all the faces with the option to name each person in the right panel. If you’re unsure of who is who, double click on the gallery view image for a large preview and you will see each face is highlighted. Hold down the Alt (Windows)/ Option (Mac) key and use the arrow keys to jump from face to face with a magnified view for easy identification.

For people photographers, the Find People tool has huge time-saving potential and it’s easy and quick to use.

 

Excire’s AI powered keywording works well as you can see with image taken in Venice with keywords including Boat, Lake, Waters and Person. The keyword Venice can be added manually and then copied onto other images but Excire has provided a good start.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Keywording

Keywording is the process of tagging descriptive words to your photos and doing it manually takes time and a great deal of it if you like to crunch the detail, even with a keyword-friendly software such as Lightroom. Personally, I keep it simple and often just tag the location, species, technique or project and I have all the keywords in a file that I import into every Lightroom catalogue.

Excire has AI-powered auto keywording that’s done when pictures are added. To get the benefit of the feature, make sure the Analyze photos is ticked when you import the images. The downside is that the initialisation process slows down the import process. However, as we’ve mentioned previously, if you have a large collection to add, leave Excire running overnight.

Excire’s keywording skills are impressive for general shots and you’ll find some images have many keywords while others might have one or two. Look at each keyword and you’ll see figures such as 0.99 or 0.97, which is the software marking itself on the accuracy of its keywording skills.

Excire doesn’t always go into too much fine detail, so you won’t, for example, get specific species or location. That said, some - but not all - of my shots of Big Ben were correctly keyworded while Waterloo Bridge was incorrectly identified as Tower Bridge.

Excire’s auto keywording is remarkably good and useful but don’t expect deep detail. I shoot a lot of nature so I found, for example, that pelicans were correctly labelled but not further identified as dalmatian or great whites. With my photos of ring-necked parakeets taken in the garden, these were correctly tagged as birds but for the next level of identification, I got budgerigar, tit and parrot, although not in all cases even in the same sequence. With insects, butterflies, caterpillars and dragonflies were all keyworded accurately but without the specific species although a praying mantis was correctly labelled. 

Excire’s AI keywording is not infallible and may not go into enough detail for some photographers, but there is no denying its overall effectiveness and time-saving potential.

 

When images are loaded into Excire Foto, its AI checks out each image technically and pictorially and gives it an Aesthetics rating out of a maximum score of 100. The enlarged section shows the Aesthetics rating of 83.18 for this image.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Aesthetics rating

Among Excire’s AI driven features is its ability to aesthetically assess your pictures giving a score out of 100. The software looks at the image characteristics such as exposure, sharpness, content, lighting and so on and makes an automated judgement. 

Leaving obvious technical failings aside, assessing a picture’s pictorial qualities is of course subjective and asking AI to perform the task is interesting. 

In my 250,000 plus database, a Burnham lighthouse at sunset picture was rated at 96.17 while a completely detailless black frame scored 14.78 but it should be much lower.

Where I think Excire’s aesthetic assessment will be particularly useful is with people pictures, where its AI skills can check whether a subject’s eyes are open or not, as well as technical considerations such as exposure and focus. 

Use the Sort by tool, choose Aesthetics and click on descending and your best shots, as rated by Excire, will sit at the top and you can focus your attention on those. It’s amazing that a 250,000 plus image database can be re-ordered in literally a second or so.

 

Excire’s AI culling module organises images into groups defined by different criteria which makes it a breeze to compare similar images shot in sustained bursts, for example.

 

Excire Foto 2025 Culling module

Shooting lots of pictures takes up storage and of course there is no point hanging onto shots that are obvious failures. Identifying rejects takes time so here Excire can also help you out with its Culling Project feature. There’s a selection of people-oriented culling profiles (People, Wedding, Vacation) but you can create your own profiles using aesthetic and technical settings. 

I decided to cull a folder of images taken last autumn at Bushy Park. It took six minutes for Excire to work through 487 Raws organising the shots into 71 Sequences, 31 Visual Similarity Groups and 136 Smart Selections. Clicking on the relevant category in the Culling Projects panel and you can check out what Excire has done. 

With each sequence or group open using Ctrl+Shift (Windows) / Cmd+Shift (Mac) and the left and right arrows on the keyboard lets quickly go through the sequences and you can select the keepers with the number keys 1-5 for star ratings, 6-9 for colours and X for rejects. You could even base your ratings on each image’s Aesthetic rating.

Again, it’s worth repeating that Excire’s speed is incredible and using full screen (F key) and the left and right arrows means you can check and rate photos as fast as you like. In this respect, Lightroom and even Fast Raw Viewer are left trailing in Excire’s wake in terms of speed. The only feature I would have liked is the option of auto advance so the next image appears automatically after rating the previous one.

 

This set of images has been grouped into sequences. That’s very useful for subjects such as nature where shooting sustained bursts of very similar pictures is normal.

 

Excire Photo 2025 Verdict

In my book, any device, gadget or software that saves time sitting in front of a keyboard is a good thing and there’s much to appreciate and enjoy in Excire Foto 2025. It’s a powerful image management software and I found it very useful and user-friendly and not frustrating in the way that Adobe Lightroom Classic can be. 

During the review, I loaded 250,000 images in a single database. In my experience, a catalogue that large in Lightroom Classic means waiting for previews to refresh and sharpen. In Excire, previews and thumbnail views are refreshed very quickly. Using the arrow keys, regardless of the chosen preview size, I could go from image to image with the tap of a key and no lag at all. Critically checking and rating images is amazingly quick and Excire Foto 2025 is worth the money for this capability alone.

Speed, of course, is important but it’s Excire’s many organisational skills that make it a great all-round asset management software. AI culling, AI keywording, its powerful search and organising skills, yes there’s a great deal to admire and enjoy in Excire Foto 2025. 

Of course, £199 / $229 is a significant purchase but you need to factor in how much time and effort Excire Foto 2025 will save you, and how many more pictures you could be out taking rather than sitting in front of a computer. In that context, it’s superb value for money.

 

Excire Photo 2025 Pros

• Fast, even with huge image collections
• Face and people search
• Easy to use
• Text prompt search works well
• Auto keywording is especially useful for people shots
• AI-assisted culling
• Outright purchase, no subscription
• Works for stills and video
• Excire runs locally – images aren’t sent into the cloud for analysis so there’s complete privacy
• Video playback possible directly from the preview

 

Excire Photo 2025 Cons

• £199 / $229 is a significant investment
• Importing big photo collections takes time but it’s a one-time job
• Auto keywording can be less effective for non-people photos
• Aesthetic rating might not appeal to everyone
• Auto advance after image rating would be nice

 

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You come back with a strong wildlife frame, open it in Lightroom, and then hesitate. The problem is not the sliders, it is the lack of a plan. 

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Churches are something the majority of us will have in our towns and villages and they're a great location for a spot of photography as they're just as interesting on the inside as they are on the outside. Plus, you might have a graveyard to explore as well. Whatever your style of photography, a church will probably have something to grab your attention. 

 

1. Getting Access 

 

To make the most of what our churches have to offer we have to get inside them which can be trickier than you think. Larger churches and cathedrals may have photographic restrictions (a fee payable to use a tripod, no flash etc.) and certain opening hours but generally smaller, local churches are more willing to give you access any time of the day. Just phone in advance to let the vicar or whoever holds the key know that you'd like to take some photographs inside the church. In many smaller towns churches are left unlocked during the day. 

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In buildings of this size, you might as well keep your flash in your bag as it will only add light to objects a few feet in front of you. Instead, you need to get your sturdy tripod out, fasten your camera to it and use a long exposure.

As exposures can be several seconds long, the smallest of nudges can cause the camera to shake so try using a remote / cable release or the camera's self-timer option to reduce it. You could even use your Smartphone to trigger the shutter if you have a camera which can be controlled remotely via smart devices. When it comes to lenses, anything goes. Telephoto lenses can be used to capture the details found on the roof, wide-angle lenses for the wider architectural scenes and macro lenses for close up details of pews, columns and altars.

 

2. Respect Your Surroundings & Fellow Visitors 

 

Before we discuss shooting suggestions do please remember churches, particularly smaller ones, are quiet places so try to make as little noise as possible as you move around. Be respectful of others around you who are there to pray etc. too.

If you're visiting a church that's popular with tourists do remember that others will want to take photos too so work quickly or plan your visit for first thing in the morning or nearer closing time when less visitors will be around. 

 

3. Shooting Suggestions 

 

Try shooting down the aisle to capture the lines of pews, altar and everything else people think of when you ask them to describe a church. Find a comfy pew or a part of the floor you can lie on (don't worry about the funny looks) and focus your lens on the roof which often has interesting patterns and features. Don't be afraid to get in close to objects either.

Reflections off windows, cases and even abstract shots of blurred lines of pews up close can create interesting images. Although if you're trying to capture images of objects protected by cases you won't want reflections or glare spoiling your shot. Try using an ND, polarising filter or cupping your hand around your lens to cut down on reflections and have a cloth handy to remove any fingerprints that have been left on the case.

The large stained glass windows found in most churches look great when lit up by sunlight and they also work well as zoom burst subjects, something we've covered previously on the site. 
 

You've read the technique now share your related photos for the chance to win prizes: Daily Forum Competition

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The latest winner of our popular daily photography theme which takes place in our forums have been chosen and congratulations go to saxon_image (Day 2 - Spring).

 

Daily Theme Runners-Up

If you didn't win this time, keep uploading your images to the daily competition forum for another chance to win! If you're new to the Daily Theme, you can find out more about it in the Daily Theme Q&A. 

Well done to our latest runners-up, too, whose images you can take a look at below.

  Day 1

Daffodils

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Day 3

Creative Horizons

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Day 4

Sky

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  Day 5

Sense Of Scale

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Day 6

Movement

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Day 7

Outdoor Portraits

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You’ll find the Daily Themes, along with other great photo competitions, over in our Forum. Take a look to see the latest daily photo contests. Open to all levels of photographer, you’re sure to find a photography competition to enter. Why not share details of competitions with our community? Join the camaraderie and upload an image to our Gallery.

Somewhere in your camera's menu system, buried three levels deep in a file settings submenu you've probably never explored, there's an option to change your default image format from JPEG to HEIF. It's been there for a while now. Canon, Sony, and Nikon have all added it to their mirrorless bodies over the past few years. And almost nobody uses it. 

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If you feel that your street photos are uninteresting or just aren't working anymore, it could be because your scenes are too cluttered. Learn five useful techniques that can help you minimize distracting elements from your compositions.

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Most photographs never leave a screen. We printed the same image three different ways and discovered how much presentation changes not just the photo, but the way you shoot. 

Usually, photos get edited, posted, maybe shared, and then they live their entire life as a glowing rectangle in someone’s hand. That workflow has become so normal that many photographers never stop to question it. But while screens are convenient, they are not the full experience of a photograph.

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Choosing between a 16-35mm and a 24-70mm isn’t about wide versus standard zoom in the way most people think. The real difference is narrower, and once you see it, the decision gets simpler and more personal. 

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The push to fix what’s wrong in your photos can drain the joy out of making them. This discussion centers on five images that show what’s working and why those choices matter when you’re out shooting. 

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Camera brands collaborating with mobile phone companies is nothing that is particularly new. We saw this with Zeiss, with Leica, and even Hasselblad. But even this collaboration took me by surprise. That is, between Honor and none other than ARRI, with the Honor Robot Phone. 

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Winter fog on a near-empty pier forces hard choices about lens, framing, and intent. A single word, “bleak,” can push you out the door and shape what you shoot when the weather feels like an excuse to stay home. 

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Tourist photography looks casual on the surface, but most so-called candid moments are carefully directed. If you travel and pull out a camera, you’re part of a performance whether you realize it or not. 

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In what is a hot take only if you're an Adobe shareholder, the MacBook Neo is the biggest sign yet that Adobe's subscription model needs some major rethinking. 

It's 2026, and tariffs, war and inflation, amongst other things, have been hitting American wallet pretty hard. Apple was able to read the room and responded with the $599 MacBook Neo ($499 if you're a student or educator). There are other reasons the thing exists, of course. Apple wanted to lure people using cheap Windows computers with their iPhones. They wanted to corner the education market.

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Some people put their pets before family and have images of their favourite dog sat alongside their wedding, holiday and children's pictures. This might be you too! Of course, you are stuck if you do not have a dog, but the odds are you know someone with one so if you are really keen, finding a subject is not an issue.
 

1. Kit Suggestions 

 

In terms of kit, all you need is a camera with a lens or two. Or you could try something like using a Lens Baby for a different effect. If you're heading to a dog show consider taking a smaller camera bag as space can be a premium and leave the tripod at home. 
 

2. Do They Like The Camera?

 

Having a trained dog that's used to being in front of a camera will make things easier. You don't want to get your camera out to find they either want to eat it or won't come near you because they're unsure about it. Some dog could not give two hoots; others will just scamper away.

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3. Get Them Running Around 

 

Pet photography is a popular subject, but most people tend to snap their dog when sitting, rather than capturing the active moments dogs are well known for.

Shots of your pet running and chasing around are far more interesting than a static shot of them sat on a rug in front of the fire. But to capture them it takes some planning and dogs running around are fast and they can be unpredictable. Having someone with you (your partner? Kids?) definitely will be a help because you can ask them to call for the dog while you concentrate on shooting.

Try autofocus with continuous shooting and see if it can track the subject. It might cope well but as dogs move quickly and their coats are low contrast, autofocus can be tricky so try manually pre-focusing on a particular spot and when your dog runs to it, press the shutter.

You'll need a reasonably fast shutter but not so fast that the dog is frozen in the image. Having a mix of sharpness and blur can work well, or just use an even slower shutter speed for more blur to exaggerate its movement. 
 

4. Get Down Low 

 

We're used to standing and looking down on dogs so a shot from this height is nothing special. So instead, try getting down to your dog's eye level or even lower. Kneel, lie (but there's no need to roll over!) to produce a much more dynamic and interesting shot. With features like LiveView, getting a composition from ground-level is easy enough. Of course, there are times when shooting from a higher angle works well such as in the shot at the top of the article.

  5. Exposure Tips 

 

Expose for the dog and not the surroundings. If you have a particularly dark or light dog you may find exposure compensation helps the camera meter correctly. As with human portraiture, it's also important for the eyes to be sharp but again, due to the speed they move, this can be difficult to perfect.
 

6. Natural Light Is Your Friend

 

Natural light is good but as with humans, dogs look less good in contrasty light. For maximum detail in the coat, a bright sky when the sun is gently diffused by high cloud can work well. If the day is quite dull, try fitting the flashgun to lighten the shadows or try underexposing the daylight so your lit subject stands out proudly from a darker sky - it can be a great look.
 

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