Taking family portraits is an important part of our photographic journey. And so is making portraits of our 4-legged family members. We sometimes forget to take the time to honor our canine friends with a portrait or two, but it’s really easy to take an awesome, professional-looking picture of our pets. Here are 6 steps to taking great pictures of your dog. Our model for the day is the beautiful and sweet Lucy dog.

1) Choose the right time of day for your pet. This should be a time when your dog is compliant, mellow and happy. If they lose patience for the process, take a break and see if you can run them around a bit and come back to the puddle of light a little later. We did these pictures in three installments over the course of about 30 minutes.

2) Find great light. For these portraits, I moved Lucy into a room with diffused and dappled puddles of light (it was about 9am). Direct light was hitting the window sheers, giving a beautiful quality of light in the room. We played in the room for 15 minutes or so, and as she moved around, the light hit different parts of her face and body. This gives the pictures an interesting look, and is very flattering to the dog.

3) Choose the right lens:

For Point-and-Shoot users: use a medium or long lens. Try zooming in half way between your widest and longest lens. If you use your widest lens, you may find that the pictures focus more on the background than on the dog. Zooming in and moving away from the dog a bit will help the picture focus more on the pooch.

For SLR users: I used a 50mm lens at f/1.8, with my camera set to aperture priority. Because Lucy is a mellow dog and wasn’t moving around very much, I was able to hold focus on her eyes. The result is a soft lens look with very shallow depth of field.

4) Get down on your dog’s level. Pictures taken of dogs from high above lose the magic of interaction. For the best angles, get down on the floor with your dog and shoot them from their eye level.

5) Take lots and lots of pictures. Dogs move around a lot, so you might have many shots that are out of focus. But keep at it, and experiment with different lenses, framing, angles, and settings.

6) Capture different expressions. To get that great cocked ear look, try using a funny voice. I was able to call Lucy’s name with a high-pitched voice that made her look at me quite quizzically. We tried this many times and got all kinds of great expressions.

You may have to work at finding the best techniques to get your dog to cooperate, but practice makes perfect. Once they’re used to the camera and to you being on the floor, the photo ops will start flooding in.

Remember, more than anything, this should be a fun experience for you and your dog and a chance to spend some quality time together.