I had one of my more pleasant experiences photographing animals this morning at Ad Astra Alpacas. You know what they say about working with kids or animals. Having been a photographer at a “get your picture taken with Santa” booth years ago, as well art directing plenty of dog-and-cat photo shoots for pet food manufacturers… I have some stories. However, I think the alpaca might be one of my new favorite four-legged subjects.

These guys were very calm and didn’t spook terribly easily as long as I kept my movements slow and steady. One thing I did notice early on was that putting the camera to my face would get them a little nervous. I’d move in close and they’d be fine until the camera came up and then they would shy away a bit. On the other hand, if I held the camera out low, they would become curious and lean in to inspect it. My most successful shots came from shooting blind using this technique with my 17-35 racked out wide and an f-stop of at least f/8 to give me a little depth of field latitude.

This shot was made earlier on when I was still getting the system down. I was at f/3.5 here and got lucky that the focus point caught the eye but I do like the shallow focus on the fence.