Lighting
 

Hello,
I'd like to set up a studio for my pet photography business. Most of what I do now is on-site. I am in need of a good lighting setup for a studio that will work with blue eyed pets. Right now, if I use flash, eyes show up as red-even with Red Eye Reduction.

Thanks,
Marie

[QUOTE=Mommasdolls;759081]Hello,
I'd like to set up a studio for my pet photography business. Most of what I do now is on-site. I am in need of a good lighting setup for a studio that will work with blue eyed pets. Right now, if I use flash, eyes show up as red-even with Red Eye Reduction.

Thanks,
Marie[/QUOTE]

Assuming you have an external flash, bounce the flash off the ceiling or side walls.

You can also get a flash "slave" where you can have other flash units away from the camera.

A lot of modern flashes have "diffuser" shields that would help spread the light away from the eyes. If your flash doesn't, an old trick is to tape a thin napkin over your flash. Give it a try.

Or connive some trick to have the animal looking away from the lense/flash.

You have red spots in the eyes because the light from the flash is bouncing into the back of the eye and then rocketing back to the camera. The above suggestions would help eliminate that.

Rick C
[url]www.goldentales.ca[/url]

What Rick said was very helpful. To eliminate red eye, you have to try to get your flash off the camera.

You should decide whether you want to go with smaller flashes and still be able to use them on location or you want to use larger studio flashes.

You can still take studio flashes on location with power packs.
Studio flashes offer a lot of power and faster recycle time compared to speedlights. With pets moving around so much and having to catch them at the right time, studio flashes definitely offer that ability to reduced the missed shots because the flash didn't recycle (fully charge itself) in time.

Larger light modifiers such as softboxes and umbrellas will be able to give you some interesting catch light to offer that nice kick to the eyes.

I used an umbrella set up with two Nikon SB800s for this shot:
[IMG]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2800/4089679548_9190433712.jpg[/IMG]