The other day, we were working on some outdoor shots. I had my dance partner with us (my speed light with a remote trigger), we had the toddler, my assistant, and my assistant’s puppy. Yes, that dog is big, but believe it or not it is only a few months old. Anyways, my assistant wanted some photos of herself with the puppy.
Except, the puppy was doing what puppies do best – being absolutely chaotic and not even remotely caring about what any of us were doing or what we wanted it to do. This frustrated my assistant. She wanted to show me how she taught the puppy to sit on command. Then she just wanted to get him to look at the camera. Then she got frustrated some more because he just wasn’t doing any of it.
I told her to take a deep breath (which I recommend to everyone by the way), reminded her that he is only a puppy, and told her sometimes you just must be patient and that getting frustrated would likely only get the puppy upset which would only take us further away from our goal.
Meanwhile, the toddler was just having a blast. She found what she said was a “cat tail” and wanted me to take a picture of her with it as her cat tail. Then she wanted me to take a picture of her with her stroller and after that her with her doll. I know I have been very repetitive on this, but this brings me back to doing photography on the toddler’s terms if you want good pictures. Let them do things they want to do and give them a little creative input on your photography, and they will run with it and ask you photograph them a whole lot of different ways.
Anyways, back to the puppy dilemma, I just let the scenario play out and waited. Eventually the right time came, I clicked it, and we ended up with that first picture. If you like the picture (I do), patience is key. If you don’t like the picture, patience is still key, as the right moment will pop up eventually.
For these photos, I had my speedlight, in an octagon softbox with a speedlight and the previously mentioned remote trigger.