Thirteen Tips for Better Sheep Photos

Text Box: Thirteen Tips for Better Sheep Photos By Nancy Chase Because Icelandic sheep are still relatively uncommon in this country, we breeders are scattered far and wide, often many miles from where the buyers—or prospective buyers—of our breeding stock, fleeces, and other products live. The result is that many buyers choose whether or not to buy from us based on the information and photos on our web sites, rather than traveling hundreds of miles to visit several farms in person before making a decision. Even if a buyer does visit your farm before making a purchase, your web site is probably one of the major influences that made him choose to visit your farm rather than someone else’s. Since your web site often provides the first—and sometimes only—impression of what your farm and flock are like, it’s important that your photos show them off to their best advantage. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a great photographer or have a fancy camera to take decent sheep photos. It just takes a little planning and care. 1. Know Your Goal: Not all photos have the same purpose. Think about what kinds of photos you want to include on your web site or other promotional materials. What should the photos communicate about your flock? What qualities would you like to emphasize? If you know what you’re trying to accomplish with each photo session, you’re more likely to get the kind of pictures you need. Are you trying to get a full-body conformation shot to show off the great build on that lamb on your sales list? A stunning, close-up portrait of the wonderful horn spread on your best ram? A panoramic scene of the whole flock grazing in a lush spring pasture? 2. Plan Ahead: Some photo opportunities are seasonal. You can’t get cute pictures of newborn lambs in November. In May, you can’t get pictures of your new flock sire in full fleece, silhouetted against stunning fall foliage. If you want pictures of your flock forging through deep snowdrifts, you have to take them in the winter. If you want pictures that show a lot of detail of the sheep’s conformation, you need to take them right after shearing, before the wool growth obscures the muscling. That all may sound obvious, but if you don’t plan ahead it can be easy to get caught up with the daily routine of farm tasks and miss out on capturing those seasonal moments. It’s not just the seasons you need to consider. What other patterns and routines affect your flock? Where are your sheep likely to be and what are they likely to be doing at a particular time? When do they look most (and least) attractive? At what time of day is the angle of the sunlight the best? It’s hard to take good photos in heavy shade or blazing sun, so don’t schedule your photo session when you know the sheep are likely to be napping deep in the woods or grazing in the noon-day sun. Sheep tend to look alert and photogenic right before feeding time or when moving out onto fresh pasture, but if you try to photograph them during feeding time, all you’re likely to get is a lot of pictures of them with their butts facing you and their heads shoved into the feeder. If you need to take sales pictures of this year’s lambs, but your pasture grass is two feet tall, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to get decent shots where the lambs are actually visible. Instead, mow a grassy paddock and put the lambs in there for their picture day. On the other hand, if your goal is to capture scenic shots of happy lambs on lush pasture, the half-hidden-in-deep-grass look may be just what you’re looking for. Although planning can be very helpful, don’t over plan so much that you miss those spontaneous candid shots of the sheep doing something cute or interesting! 3. Do a Background Check: Even the most beautiful sheep is not going to look her best if she’s photographed in cluttered, unattractive surroundings. Before you snap that photo, take a look at what’s around and behind the sheep. Wherever possible, try to position the sheep against a clean, uncluttered background that contrasts nicely with the color of the sheep’s wool. Sometimes just moving a few feet to one side before you click will allow you to exclude that old torn tarp, manure pile, or broken feed bucket from the photo. 4. Work With Your Natural Lighting: Sheep photograph best in natural light, so turn off your flash and work with natural sunlight whenever possible. Avoid taking pictures at midday when the sun directly overhead casts a flat, harsh light. In the morning or afternoon, the slanted angle of light will make much more attractive photos. Keep the sun at your back or off to one side, and be careful not to cast your own shadow into the frame of the photo. For most purposes, the diffused light on a bright, hazy day is the easiest to work with, but direct sun can provide a stronger contrast of light and shadows if you want a more dramatic shot. 5. Get Up Close: A good close-up engages the viewer and gives him the feeling that he could almost reach out and touch the animal. Unless you’re deliberately taking panoramic shots of the flock, get as close to your subject as you can (without triggering her flight reflex). A camera with a good zoom function is a big help here. 6. Get Down: Don’t just stand there taking pictures down at your sheep. Your photos will almost always look better if you get down to their level, or even slightly lower. Wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty, because this may mean you have to sit or lie down on the ground. 7. See Eye to Eye: You don’t have to only take photos where the sheep is staring directly into the camera, but do make sure that at least one of the sheep’s eyes is showing clearly in the picture. Humans are conditioned to respond strongly to eye contact, so we tend to be attracted to photos in which we can see the animal’s eyes. You may find some exceptions to this rule—cute photos of sleeping lambs with their eyes closed, conformation shots taken from behind to show rear muscling, etc.—but in general you want your viewers to be able look into the sheep’s eyes. 8. Accentuate the Positive: Here’s where you can use your creativity to show off the sheep’s best qualities. What aspect of the animal are you most proud of? Experiment with taking pictures from different angles to find which ones show the sheep’s strengths to full advantage. Does that ram have massive curls of horn that clear his face by a mile? Consider a full-frontal close-up. Does that ewe have a stunning fleece that comes down to her ankles? Take the photo right before shearing day, to show that wool at its full glory. On the other hand, an impressive meat build is shown to full advantage if photographed shortly after shearing. You may want to take a rear shot of your best milker at the peak of her production, to show off her amazing udder. To show off a wide chest, take the picture while standing either directly or diagonally to the front of the sheep. With a little practice, you’ll develop a sense of which angles look the best for which sheep. 9. Patience and Persistence: Don’t expect to get all the photos you need in one setting. It’s an ongoing task and it takes time. Don’t be discouraged if most of your photos don’t turn out the way you had hoped. It is normal to take literally hundreds of photos just to get a couple that you really like. If you get even one excellent photo in each photo session, you’ve done well. It takes a long time to build up a large collection of good photos. Meanwhile, don’t feel like every photo on your site has to be a masterpiece. It’s okay to use whatever photos you have now, while continuing to work on getting better pictures later. If you keep working at it, little by little your inventory of excellent photos will keep increasing. 10. Crop and Retouch: Often, a mediocre photo can be transformed into a good photo, or a good photo into a great one, if you take a little time to make a few basic adjustments to it using a simple photo editing program. Crop the picture to improve the layout or to zero in on a specific area you want to emphasize. Adjust the brightness and contrast if necessary. If an otherwise good picture is just a tiny bit out of focus, you can sometimes rescue it using the photo editing software’s “sharpen” feature. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, experiment with the software’s automatic correction features—but use your own judgment; those features don’t always improve the picture. 11. Compress: Although high resolution is important for printed photos, pictures viewed on the web look fine at a lower resolution. The higher the resolution of the photos on your web page, the longer it will take for your page to load. If it loads too slowly, visitors to your site may get impatient and leave without waiting to see what you have to offer. Therefore, once you’ve sized your photos so they look good in your web site layout, you should compress them to the appropriate resolution for web viewing before you upload your page. Save the original high-resolution files elsewhere, though, in case you want to use them for some other purpose later. 12. Organize: If you regularly take lots of digital photos, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer number of photo files loaded into your computer. It doesn’t do you much good to know that you have the perfect photo somewhere if you have to spend hours searching through thousands of files to find it. Try to organize your photo files in a way that makes sense to you, so that you know where to look for them when you need them later. For myself, I keep all of my original photos in folders named chronologically by the date they were taken. Then I save copies of the best photos of each individual sheep in a folder with that sheep’s name. If you don’t already have a software program to help you organize your photo files, you might want to try Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/). It can be downloaded free off the website, and has lots of easy-to-use features for organizing, sharing, and editing your photos. 13. Back Up: Your collection of photos is a treasure trove of visual information about your flock throughout the years. It’s irreplaceable. It’s also just one serious computer failure away from being wiped out forever. So make sure to make backup copies of the files and store them in a safe place!

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