King Charles puppies

These are Cavalier King Charles spaniel puppies at 8 weeks who fell asleep during the photo session. It was here I learned the secret to photographing puppies is to let them get really tired. In this exhaustive state, they are essentially ‘punch drunk’ and you can do anything you want with them. For this shot, I pushed the puppies together on two yards of black velvet such that one puppy was lying on top of the other one. I then carefully positioned their ears. They couldn’t have cared less. I shot this with a small, white umbrella to diffuse and soften the light from the Paul C. Buff White Lightning flash unit. My settings were 1/200, f/32, and 100 ISO. The exposure was determined by a Sekonic L-358 flash meter, since I shot this in the early 90’s, I used a Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera and a 110mm normal lens. I captured the image on Fujichrome Velvia. If I had to limit myself to photographing only one subject, it would definitely be puppies.