Pet Portraits

I recently worked on a project with my Mum. She loves birds! She breeds cockatiels, and has spent hours carefully hand raising many of them over the years. It is a lot of work. Hand raising baby birds means getting up throughout the night every three to four hours to feed them. It means constant supervision, control of their environment, and a lot of care.

Because my Mum loves birds so much, I wanted to capture the personalities of some of her pets. The idea is to print them, and have these colourful portraits as artwork in her home. In each of these final shots you can really see each bird’s personality shine through. From cheeky to curious.

I used pastel colours, like I do for many of my headshots, and these ones were taken with natural light in order to not spook the birds too much. I can’t say it wasn’t challenging. Nailing the focus on the eyes of these fast-moving little beauties was a little tricky! I’m really happy how they have turned out, and over the upcoming summer I’ll be working on some more of these with my Mum – the final prints will be her christmas gift!