How to Photograph Your Pet for a Portrait
You do not need a good camera and you do not need a new photograph — most commissions begin with a picture that already exists on someone's phone. But a few things genuinely change how well the portrait comes out, and they are all easy.
Eight things that help
Shoot in daylight, near a window
Daylight is the single biggest difference between a photograph that renders well and one that does not. Indoor lamps cast a colour the studio has to guess at, and a flash flattens the face and throws a hard shadow behind it. A window on an overcast day is close to ideal.
Get down to their eye level
A photograph taken from standing height looks down on the animal and foreshortens the face. Kneel or sit so the camera is level with their eyes. This one change does more for a portrait's bearing than anything else on this list.
Fill the frame with the head and shoulders
The finished portrait is a head-and-shoulders composition, so the more of the frame their face occupies, the more detail there is to work from. A pet in the far corner of a wide room shot leaves very little to render.
Focus on the eyes
Tap the screen on their eyes before you take the picture. The eyes carry the likeness — a photograph that is sharp on the nose but soft on the eyes produces a portrait that looks like the right animal and the wrong individual.
Avoid strong backlight
A window behind your pet turns them into a silhouette. Put the light source behind you, or off to one side. Side light is flattering and reads well in an oil-painted style, which is lit that way by tradition.
One animal per photograph
The studio composes a portrait around a single subject. If you are commissioning two pets together, use the multiple-pets option in the commission flow rather than sending a photograph of both — that option changes how the portrait is composed. Note that it is either/or: choosing multiple pets clears any extra reference photos, because those exist to refine one animal's features.
Send up to 3 photographs
The first photograph you send composes the portrait. Any others are used to sharpen the likeness — a second angle, a clearer shot of their markings, the one where their ears sit right. If you only have one good picture, that is genuinely enough.
Do not worry about the rest
Blur, grain, a cluttered kitchen behind them, a slightly odd angle — none of it disqualifies a photograph. Older pictures of pets who have passed are often the least technically good and among the most worth commissioning. Send what you have.
What the uploader accepts
JPEG, PNG, WebP, or an iPhone HEIC, at least 800 pixels on the longest edge. Larger photographs are resized for you, so there is no need to shrink anything first.