The Single Thing That’s Ruining Most of Your Dog Photos

Get ready to wow your friends and family with super-cute dog pics! We up your photo taking game with five easy ways to greatly improve your photos

1. Banish Bad lighting & Glowing Eyes
Dog’s eyes often glow blue in a flash situation, making it look like a demon has taken over your dog. Avoid the flash. Natural/outdoor lighting is your best friend, next to your dog.

2. Cute props!
Up the cute factor. What about a sign worn around your dog’s neck? Or an adorable fleece scarf tied jauntily around your dog’s neck? (See page 34 for easy DIY how-to!). Or a floral headdress? (page 42) A well-chosen prop elevates your photo to the next level.

3. Brighten & Crop 
Dark images and extraneous stuff in your shot. Brighten and crop your photos. Doing the tiniest bit of tweaking can make a HUGE difference. Crop out the extraneous and brighten your photo (minor edits can be done from your phone in mere seconds) and see what an enormous difference it makes. We brighten 99.9 percent of the images we run in this magazine!

4. Clutter
This is it folks, the one thing that’s ruining most of your photos. Your dog is super adorable, that’s a given. All that clutter-y junk in the background? Not so much. Take a look at your subject’s surroundings: what can you quickly move out of frame that doesn’t need to be there? If you quickly consider your background and sweep any disruptive stuff out of the shot, you will have pretty much instantaneously improved your shot by a factor of 1000 percent.

5. Missed Moments
How many times has this happened? You miss the cute expression, instead capturing the side of your dog’s head just as she turns away. Well no more! The ingenious SqueakNSnap addresses this issue, allowing you to easily and reliably capture the exact moment of head-tilted doggone adorableness. This nifty little device—it looks like a cute teddy—plugs into your smart phone. Squeaking the stuffy triggers your phone to take a photo at the exact moment your dog’s interest is piqued and voilà, perfect photos every time! ($15, squeaknsnap.com)