Do you have any tips for taking photos of dogs who move a lot? Also, is there a way to get videos I take of a dog uploaded to my past stays gallery?
So, I regularly sit (3 hours/night - 2-3x/week) a 4-month old puppy who, as you'd expect, is extremely playful and doesn't stay still until he's sleeping after tuckering himself out. My clients work nights and don't mind if I don't send a picture every single stay since they're usually too busy to be checking their phone very often. However, I would like to be able to send pictures more often since my rate of clients who've received photos has gone down as of a result of this.
The problem is two-fold: it's extremely difficult to get a non-blurry photo of this puppy (if you look at my profile, he's the black and white furball - I'm not really happy with any of them except the one that was lucky and still has pretty bad lighting), and while I can send videos that are much easier to capture that a dog's having fun with me, they don't show up on my profile, nor do they seem to count toward having sent a photo during the stay and affect the aforementioned percentage. (Could be wrong about the latter but that's what it looks like to me.)
The fact that the videos don't show up on my profile is very annoying, because I have sat a few rescue dogs that are generally a bit anxious/depressed but they always warm up to me. But, if I stand very still trying to take their pictures and am looking at the screen instead of them, their guard seems to go up and I get a picture of them looking unsure or walking away. My most difficult and anxious dog was a stray taken in to his foster home 3 days after he was brought into the shelter and mostly just sat on the couch looking depressed. Eventually I got some slightly happy-looking pictures of him but I also have a few really adorable videos of him coming out of his shell with me and I'm kinda bummed that they don't show up on my profile because he was so happy and playful and none of that really shines through in the pictures on my profile. I'm happy that the foster mom knows he had fun with me, but if the dogs look at best kind of bored in the pictures, it doesn't present a great impression of me to potential clients looking at my profile.
So, my questions: 1) Do you have any tips/tricks for getting a very excitable dog to stay still long enough that a good photo can be taken? 2) Is there a way to get videos on my profile? If not, would Rover allow me linking to say, an online folder like Google Drive or an instagram account or would that send up red flags? 3) Anyone know if there's something in the works to get the videos sent through Rover...