10 Great Photos vs. 50 Good Ones

I’d rather give you 10 photos that might be the best photos your dog has ever had.

When I photograph a dog, my goal isn’t to give the owner 50 good photos. I want to give them the 10 best photos their dog has ever had.
 

Of course, that isn’t always possible. Some dogs are easier to work with than others, some days the light, location, dog and owner simply give me everything, and some days I have to work much harder for every photo. But that’s what I aim for in every session, every photo I deliver should be as close as possible to the best masterpiece I can create with the dog standing in front of me.
 

Because when you promise 50 photos, something has to change along the way. At some point, photos start making it into the gallery that I’m pretty sure even the owner has taken better versions of before, except they took theirs with a phone and the photographer used a professional camera. At that point, the difference is mostly the equipment, not the knowledge.
 

For a photo to be truly great for me, everything needs to work, the expression, body language, body position, light, background, composition and all the little details. You can’t create 50 photos like that with one dog during a one-hour session. You could probably do it during a full day of shooting, but come on... if I photograph the same dog for an entire day, it’s going to end with my orthopedist in the best case, or the veterinarian in the worst.
 

During an average session where I promise 10 fully edited photos, I might take anywhere from 350 to 800 shots, and sometimes even reach 1,000. That might sound like a lot for 10 photos, but I’m not photographing 1,000 different photos. During the session I usually build and direct around 11–13 different scenes, and in each one I’m looking for the exact frame I want.
 

After the session, I go through everything and usually keep around 50 potential frames that make it onto my computer for the final selection. From those, I choose the best 10, and I normally won’t choose two photos from the same scene I created. I want every photo in the gallery to give something different. And if we had an amazing session, the dog was a superstar, the owners were fun, the location and light were on our side, and there are another one or two photos that would simply be a shame to leave behind? I’m not going to be cheap about it. The client gets 11 or 12.
 

And I’m the one who chooses them.
 

In the 10 years I’ve been photographing dogs, I’ve only let clients choose their own photos a handful of times, and it simply isn’t for me. A client might choose a photo I don’t connect with nearly as much and skip one that I can already see in my head exactly how I want to edit, and maybe even really want to add to my portfolio or publish.
 

I still get excited about this work and enjoy it just as much as I did in the beginning, and one of the reasons is that I continue doing what feels right to me and creating what I actually love. A client who comes to me has already seen my work online. If they love what I do, that’s what they’ll get. And if they’re looking for something different, that’s completely fine too, there are thousands of other dog photographers who will happily provide that service. I’m not just selling a photography service, I’m selling my personal art.
 

And I have absolutely nothing against a gallery of 50 photos. The problem is that to reach that number during a normal session, it will almost inevitably be full of repetition. Every frame I direct can take one minute in a perfect situation, or 6–8 minutes when things are a little more difficult, with around four minutes being the average. After 10–15 frames like that, the dog has already been working with us for an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes. For me, that’s enough. Beyond that, the dog starts getting tired, concentration drops, and at some point we’re continuing for more photos, not for better photos.
 

And I’m saying all of this as someone who, during my first two or three years as a photographer, sold packages of 40–60 photos myself.

When you need to deliver 50 photos, the selection criteria change very quickly. Is the dog in focus? Yes. Not overexposed? Yes. Looks okay? Pass.
 

When I only need to choose 10 out of hundreds, every photo goes through about 20 filters in my head before I even decide to open it for editing. And if I have two similar photos and one is 5% better than the other, the second one is out. It can be an excellent photo, but I don’t need it.
 

When I have 10 photos, I can invest in each one the way I actually want to. I can clean every little detail that bothers me, work on the dog, the background, the colors and all those tiny things that maybe nobody else will even notice, but I will. You can’t invest in 50 photos the same way you can invest in 10, at least not without turning every session into a project that takes days and charging the client several thousand euros.
 

So yes, I can give you 50 photos.

I’d just rather give you 10 that you won’t have to choose between.