When you are a pet lover, you may want to take beautiful pictures of your beloved animal friend. You can do that in the usual way, by using your regular or smart phone camera in different life situation.

You may also want to prepare a pet photo shoot to acquire some special pictures. What does this involve? Here is what I discovered in my experience with my cat photo shoots. I will use an example involving my cat, Mr. Tom. I had to do a photo shoot with Mr. Tom for Purina’s Tidy Cats litter.

1. Prepare

a) Get your props

First, you need to have your props ready. In this case I used three boxes of Purina Tidy Cats, placed in a diagonal line.

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b) Arrange the decor

The boxes yellow color will be well assorted with Mr.Tom’s white & orange fur.

2. Insist

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You may not get the desired shoot right away, so arm yourself with patience.

He was also moving around, so some shots were not clear.

3. Improvise

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I had to move the props a few times closed to the place where Mr.Tom decided to finally sit.

I moved some of the things away in the background (in fact my wife helped me with some of these items, while I was holding the camera)

Make some noise, shake some dry food bag or a cat toy, do everything to catch your pet’s attention.

4. Take Action

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“Say cheese!” Take many photos you and then choose the best of them. Then decide on the best one that fits your purpose. For this photo shoot I took 19 photos.

5. Finish & Share

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That’s it! Now that you have your final picture, you may want to do some crop, filtering, and apply some other changes, depending where your picture will end up.

You can do that locally with a graphic software like Photoshop, or online, when posting to Instagram. Then you are ready to post your picture on Instagram and social media.

All the best with your pet photo shoot!