Lighting has a lot to do with it. Even the wall color has a lot to do with it. When I went to take pics of my chin ornaments (story for another day), I noticed just how yellow-ish my walls are. They are eggshell colored, don't get me wrong, they're NOT white... (well, they're paneling in the basement... I mean upstairs), but you really can see it on the pics. Same with when you take pics of chins.
I take most of my chin pics with my iphone. I do have a DSLR camera and occasionally will pull it out, but honestly, my iphone has more megapixels than the DSLR... which is kind of sad, as it isn't that old (and my iphone is a SE, so it's not new either). But anyway... you can take good pics with a phone, it doesn't have to be some fancy camera. No, I'm not going to get a perfectly still shot of a chin taking a dust bath, mid-roll, with my phone, but that's ok. Relatively still shots come out pretty nice.
But I wanted to mention one quick thing, since I was thinking about how sometimes, I've had to adjust settings to get a chinchilla the color that it is, in "real life." These next two pics were taken same day, within minutes of each other.
That is the same chin. Whether you know what color it is or not, I imagine you can see the chin looks more brown in the top picture, and more blue / grey in the bottom. The bottom pic is the more true-to-life picture (the chin is a sapphire wrap, by the way). Notice, the fur on the chin also looks a lot better, a lot smoother, in the second pic. No editing (come on... I don't have time even if I felt like it, lol!... and I have no idea how to use any of that software) or anything... but I wanted to show you these photos, so you could see how much different the same chinchilla can look depending on lighting and such. Actually, the difference in the two pics is how high up I had the phone aimed (the top pic is slightly looking down on the chin, the bottom pic is more eye level)... in the one, it seemed to take a better color pic and the other, a worse color pic. Usually I can see this when I'm taking the pics, and will adjust so I don't get the off-color pics, but sometimes (as in this case), I can't tell until I sit down at the computer and look at the pics.
Same goes for the way the fur looks in the pics -- I probably take a good 10-50 pics of each animal (more when they won't sit still and I know I'm getting oodles of pics of just the tail), and whether due to blurry pics, only-tail pics, off-color pics, pics where I don't like how the fur looks, whatever the case may be, I usually get down to 5-6 good pics that I like. I choose the clear pics that have most of the chin in them, or that show what I want. Sometimes I'll use oddball pics if they show a certain marking that would be hard to get a photo of otherwise (like for example, taking a shot down from on top of the chin to photo the back), but in general... lots of pics, whittle down to the ones that are the best, that make the chin look as pretty and nice as possible. I feel like it makes a difference.
When I see craigslist posts and other sort of classified posts for chins (well heck, for any animal), sometimes I wonder if people just took the first pic they could get, and posted it. It's blurry, it's far away, there's only half the chin in the photo... I don't say this all to rip on anyone, but I always think everyone has room for improvement (myself included!) and I feel like taking the time to take a good picture makes such a difference in finding the animal a home, and I felt like these two pics really helped explain what I was trying to, so, here's your photo-taking-tips for the day, haha.
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