In addition to the pet-specific aspects: Learn the basics of photography first. Practice also on easier, stationary subjects. It’s easier to figure out your framing and such when you don’t have to time an expression or follow motion.

Creative Live, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning among others have good courses. YouTube will require sifting through the people who don’t know what they’re doing. Search terms might include “getting started with photography”, “intro to photography” etc.

What’s your budget?

This is a “how do I look better in posed photographs” question, and the answer is still practice. Try out more tutorials.

Have you shown these photos to anybody else to get their opinion?

Practice.

But nobody in this sub is looking over your shoulder: you gotta provide more information to narrow down the responses. Does your camera even have the focus peaking others mention?

What camera model and what lens as precisely as you know it? A fully manual rangefinder or SLR is going to have different stuff than a modern DSLR or mirrorless. Is it able to take sharp photos in static and controlled settings, like a focus test chart?

And if you have something modern with autofocus available, what about it makes you not want to use it?

Be honest. Say you’re pretty new and learning photography and that tattoos interest you. Send a follow-up message clarifying and asking if it’s still okay. That way you set expectations.

https://www.flashpointlighting.com/blog/reverse-engineer-lighting/ https://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/04/reverse-engineering-other-shooters.html

https://youtu.be/mrsTCvLhgZE

Among many results for “reverse engineer photo”

https://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101-balancing-flash-and.html https://strobist.blogspot.com/2006/03/lighting-101balancing-flash-with.html found by Google searching “balance ambient light”

For photo 1, note the relatively sharp shadow pretty close to the flowers. Sharp shadow means small light source. You can simulate this by using a flashlight near your eye.

Photos 2 and 3 notice how much brighter the objects closer to the camera are and how fast stuff further away goes to black. Here’s a video about light falloff, found by searching “light falloff”: https://youtu.be/x1kmUvxmTVw

Run a scan for chroniton particles

This was the featured snipped when I Google searched “how to spot good light”: https://photographyconcentrate.com/the-simple-trick-to-finding-the-best-light/

More results: https://theyoungrens.com/photographers/shooting-workflow/find-natural-light/ and https://digital-photography-school.com/good-light-create-beautiful-portraits/

They’re mostly oriented for generally flattering portraits.

What other ‘basics’ of photography material have you read/watched?

[oh no song]

Or so young that they never had to learn anything other than natural language queries, perhaps. “Into to X” or “basics of X” vs “How do I take photos of a kids baseball game in the evening when the skies are cloudy?”

I learned of help vampires recently, but I think it’s more likely Google being blocked for people (not really).

Perhaps nobody ever teaching them to efficiently search the web or even YouTube, or trying to make their questions too specific to the point that they’re not searchable. Or the sample/reporting(?) bias we never see the questions from people who are able to find answers without posting, and only see the ones who seem to use asking reddit as plan A. Another major one is anything that stems from a class. Ask the instructor. Ask other students.

If you want to make something look like it was taken at night, take it at night, or indoors separated from the sunlight.

If you have an existing photo and can post it, that would give us strangers on the Internet some idea of how much work it might be to modify it. But no, it probably is not as simple as light/balance/curve editing.

I think I’m having difficulty understanding your question because it seems so off the wall.

Let’s gatekeep the gatekeepers

Practice at home. Go slow. Go a little bit faster as you get more comfortable. It’s made of metal, not glass. Put it in wrong and see what prevents you from mounting it wrong.

The engineers designed it to handle being used. Your fear and anxiety about the gear are getting in the way of using it. You can get a feel for how much force to expect.

People bite off more than they can chew all the time when they don’t know. They think it’s easy. Has he done any professional photography ever at all?

How much did you pay? At this point you can treat it as wasted money, a cost for the lesson on how not to hire photographers. You can choose to not chase him.

Examples would be helpful and potentially more efficient than you trying to describe the scene.

https://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/ focuses on on-camera flash techniques. Bounce flash with your external flash and diffused flash can do a lot, though you have to learn to balance the ambience.

Examples would be helpful and potentially more efficient than you trying to describe the scene.

https://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/ focuses on on-camera flash techniques. Bounce flash with your external flash and diffused flash can do a lot, though you have to learn to balance the ambience.

Quantum stuff. Electrons and photons are discrete packets of energy.

You can point map out the light, multiply by the albedo, divide by the radiative emissivity of the surface, correcting for temperature variations, and then disentangle the surface roughness, ending with ray tracing the turbo encabulator.

But most people find the math and coordinate transformations in the frequency domain to be too difficult to do in their head, and inputting everything into a slide rule is really slow.

It’s probably fastest to use the guess-and-adjust method the other person said.

I have not watched that anime so don’t know the example you saw. I also was not into journal use when I was shooting more actively. I journaled other stuff and then changed formats as I went. So here’s some brainstorming.

Go do it for a while, and let yourself discover what you want in it, and then format it nicely as you figure it out. Put all your shooting data if you want, then decide after whether you want to pare down how much you write because it’s also in the metadata in the file. With digital it’s less important to write down the exposure values for each frame, so you could concentrate on trends for outings.

If you work with lights (continuous or strobe) sketches of the setup. Others might just back up and take a photo of the setup, or sit where the subject is and shoot outwards to see what the subject would see (or ‘see’ in the case of an object).

Ideas for notes outside of shooting: things you want to keep an eye out for because you didn’t notice them at the time (distracting objects, for example). As you read/watch learning material, takeaways and things to try, and then after when you decide how you felt about the techniques. Lessons learned for when you mess up, such as packing lists or checklists so you don’t drive somewhere short a critical piece of equipment.