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Shutter Speed

Shot at 1/500 sec, f/1.8, ISO 160.

Shutter speed = how quickly the “eye” of the camera closes to freeze the action. The faster the shutter = the better it freezes moving objects, but, the less light that gets in. Represented as 1/whateverths of a second. Eg., 1/500= one five-hundreth of a second. 

As a general rule, my shutter speed is never slower than 1/400 second. This is something I will rarely compromise, in order to get more light. It just isn’t worth it to end up with a blurry/soft photo.

For action, it is at least 1/1000 – faster if I have enough light! Ideally 1250 or 1600!

I usually keep my shutter speed at 1/500 because even Loki, my perfect model, is a living, breathing, moving creature. 1/500 freezes his slight movements, while still letting in as much light as possible. 

A too-slow shutter speed, of about 1/125 second, is the MAIN mistake I see beginners making when they’re wondering why their images aren’t very sharp. 

Shot at 1/1250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1600

This photo (click to enlarge), as well as having a lot else wrong with it, was probably taken at 1/125 second. Everything is slightly soft and blurry because of this slow shutter speed. 

I will also – although more rarely – increase the shutter speed in high light conditions. E.g, if I was shooting in bright sunlight. This is because my aperture will almost always be at its widest – allowing in the most light but making sure I get a nice, soft background. Although I could change my aperture to allow in less light, it would mean more of the background would be in focus, which isn’t usually what I want – and my ISO will be at its lowest, so the only other setting I can change to get a photo at the correct exposure without compromising the look of the image, is shutter speed. If this doesn’t make sense yet, don’t worry! It will all come together as you learn how the other aspects of the “exposure triangle” work.

Having a too-fast shutter speed will rarely/never be a problem. Having a too-slow shutter speed will be!

This photo is a great example of the above. It was quite bright out (though not harsh sun). Usually I would take this kind of portrait on 1/500 second, f/1.8 and ISO whatever. However on this day, because of all the extra light, I was already on f/1.8 and ISO 100 (as low as it can go, so letting in the least amount of light), and it was still EXTREMELY bright. My options would have been to narrow the aperture – meaning there would have been a lot more detail in the foreground, and in that soft creamy background…. or to increase the shutter speed, which would just freeze any small motions Journey made even better.

As a result, the settings were: 1/1250 sec, f/1.8, ISO 100. 

Choosing a Lens

Table of Contents

General Advice

My advice to most people looking into equipment is to invest your money in “glass” (lenses) rather than the camera body. A good lens will make an average camera body look much better than it actually is. There is definitely a difference between cheap lenses and expensive lenses, and if you cheap out with your lenses in the beginning, I suspect you’ll quickly regret it. 

I’ve made a table below of different lens lengths. Keep in mind I am NOT a lens expert. It’s worth speaking to the people at a photography store (but they will likely recommend a 50mm as that’s commonly used for human portraiture, not pet photography). “Nifty 50s” can be fine beginner lenses but I don’t know ANY pet photographers who use them regularly. Most people who buy one as their beginner lens very quickly out-grow them and need to upgrade (probably to something longer). 

Things to consider when choosing a lens:

  • The best quality lenses, and the best lenses for (almost all) pet photography purposes are going to be “fast”. I’m not talking about how quickly they can focus (although this is important too) but rather how wide their widest aperture is.
    • Basically, a lens with an f-number of f/2.8 or wider (smaller numbers, eg., f/2, f/1.8, f/1.6, f/1.4, f/1.2) are going to allow more light in (allowing you to shoot in lower light conditions), and are going to give you a narrower depth of field (creating that beautiful blurry background and bokeh light spots).
    • A lens with a minimum aperture of f/3.5, f/4.5 or f/5.6 won’t give you a blurry background, is limited in how much light you need before you’re raising the ISO too high, and is therefore quite a lot more limiting. I can’t think of any reason you would want a lens with these apertures for pet photography except MAYBE for landscapes. Look for lenses that have a fixed aperture of f/2.8 or wider.
  • The next thing to consider is focal length, eg., how far away from the dog you need to be to take the photo and therefore how much of the background is included in the photo.
    • The shorter/wider angle the lens, the more of the background, and the longer the lens, the more compression (showing only a very narrow section of the background, giving you the ability to shoot on a roadside by a flowery bush, and have ONLY the flowery bush in the background). 
  • Using a wide angle lens requires you to be much more conscious of things like having trees growing out of the dog’s head (since you can see so much of the background and it isn’t as soft and blurry as a longer lens), and having a lot of open sky in the background, which does not turn into soft and pretty bokeh spots like it does with longer lenses, but stays as big bright speckled patches between the trees – see the examples below.
  • I’m not recommending specific brands/models here. There are literally dozens of 85mm (for example) lenses across the range of brands. Sony e-mount lenses alone have 3-4 varieties of an 85mm lens. 
  • Keep in mind as well, if your camera is a “crop sensor”, that a 35mm will act more like a 50mm lens, a 50mm lens will act/feel more like an 85mm and so on. I’ve listed the lengths below as they are on a full frame camera. I’m also not going to list all zoom variations (eg., 16-35mm, 28-75mm, etc etc) as there are just too many. 
  • “Prime” lenses are fixed lengths, and tend to be slightly sharper than a zoom lens. Prime lenses also usually come in versions with wider apertures than zoom lenses, which generally only go to f/2.8.
  • You tend to get what you pay for with lenses. If a lens is extremely cheap, you need to expect that it won’t be that sharp, may have quite some chromatic aberration, may struggle to focus, and so on. 
  • There are some examples of images taken with different lens-lengths below the table.

Lens Comparison Table

Lens length
Good for…
Keep in mind
14, 20, 24mm
Landscape photos. Mountains, lakes, wide sweeping plains. Any time you want to emphasise the SIZE of the landscape. Also for “bobble-head” or “dog-selfie” type images.
Can have some distortion when taking photos of the dog up close, enlarging the head and making them look strange.
28mm, 35mm
Moderate landscapes, a slightly different perspective than most “traditional” pet photographer lenses.
Still includes quite a lot of the background, so not great for isolating the pet in an image
50mm
It’s said the 50mm lens is closest to how the world looks from with our eyes, so a lot of people begin with a 50mm as the length feels very comfortable. Used a lot in human portraiture, but considered a bit “boring” as it’s pretty safe.
Not really often used in pet photography as it’s a bit of a “nothing” lens. It doesn’t have a lot of background compression so you still get a lot of the background included, you need to be quite close to your subject to get real background blur/bokeh, which doesn’t work for full body shots of dogs. It’s definitely more a human head/shoulders portrait lens, IMO.
70-200mm f/2.8
I’m listing this as a zoom rather than a stand-alone 70mm (I think the next prime lens is an 85). This is one of the MOST recommended lenses for beginning pet photographers. It usually has good AF speed for action, is very versatile in that you can zoom in and out of dogs moving around. For portraiture, zooming in to 135mm or 200mm gives you a lot of compression (squashes up the background to achieve that narrow depth of field and creamy bokeh). It’s probably not as sharp as a prime lens, but perfectly acceptable for pet photography
Can be pretty big and heavy. The better quality and “faster” versions are usually expensive, but you could use this lens and no other lenses, if you wanted, so it’s worth the investment.
85mm
This is actually one of my favourite lenses. 95% of the images on my Instagram and on this website will be taken with my 85mm f/1.8. The version I have is light and small so it’s super easy to carry around. It was inexpensive so I don’t mind it getting a bit beaten up on our walks. The images are super sharp, and I really like the working length – I’m not too far from the dogs so I don’t have to fall off a cliff to try and get them in the frame, but there’s still a lovely amount of compression and foreground and background blur.
You MAY want more compression for even softer and creamier backgrounds on full body portraits, especially for client shoots. Not so great with action as it’s a bit wide to take in any action happening far away, and you can’t zoom in or out.
105mm, 135mm
I’ve grouped these together even though they’re slightly different. A lot of people love the 105mm, and I believe the Sigma 105mm f/1.4 ART lens produces incredible images (but it ridiculously heavy! Lots of glass in there). Both lenses have beautiful compression of the background even for full body shots. My Sony 135mm f/1.8 GM is my sharpest lens, and the one I use for client shoots (so any photos on this website of dogs that aren’t mine are likely taken with this lens).
Likely quite a heavy lens, and probably pricey too. Takes some getting used to working at this focal length, and can be a little restrictive as there’s a LOT of foreground before the subject, so you have to find places that work with the lens. Also you have to be quite far away from the dog, so if you’re trying to shoot in a smaller space (eg., there’s a ditch or hill or something behind you) then you might run out of room. Also if your dog doesn’t stay, you mightn’t be able to get far enough away to use this lens.
200mm+
These super long lenses are usually only used in wildlife or bird photography, when the subject is a long way away and can’t be approached. Of course you COULD use them for pet photography, and you would get amazing compression and soft backgrounds, but I think there are more convenient lenses. I believe Marc Gaub (an amazing photographer who takes photos at the agility world championships) uses a 300mm f/2 lens. It’s a BEAST.
Super heavy!!! So much glass!! You constantly have to be very far from your subject and considering all the foreground that may be blocking the view of your subject. Also usually very expensive too as they’re quite specialist lenses.

Wide Angle Lenses (from 10-24mm)

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16mm on a crop frame. Old photo, please ignore the blown-out sky

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16mm (not my photo, from pixabay)

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16mm (not my photo, from pexels)

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16mm (not my image. From pixabay)

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16mm (not my image, from pexels)

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10mm (not my image, from pexels)

Taken at f/2.8 with a 24mm lens.

Tamron 17-28mm taken at 27mm, f/2.8

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Tamron 17-28mm f/2.8 taken at 20mm, f/2.8

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Tamron 17-28mm, taken at 25mm f/2.8

Mid-length lenses (28-50mm)

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28mm f/2.0 Very lightly edited - the huge areas of white/blue behind Journey were just open sky. This was taken in the middle of the woods in winter so there was nothing to filter out the sky. It's not pretty. There was sky EVERYWHERE.

28mm f/2.8 lens

28mm f/2.0This is quite a cute effect. Limiting the amount of sky through the trees, and being close to the dog for a narrow depth of field is really key.

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50mm (not my image, from pexels)

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50mm on a crop frame

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35mm (not my image, from pexels)

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40mm

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52mm

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50mm

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28mm

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35mm

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Sigma 35mm

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Sigma 35mm

Longer Lenses (85mm-135mm)

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85mm

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85mm

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85mm

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135mm

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135mm

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135mm

A fine-art headshot of a border collie backlit and amongst the ferns

85mm

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85mm

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85mm

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70-200mm

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135mm

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135mm

Focal Length Comparisons

The images below will show you comparisons between different focal lengths. I will be slowly building up a “library” of these images – but I generally try and avoid changing my lenses mid shoot, and usually don’t stray from the 85mm or 135mm anyway.

These photos will have been taken at the same location, though I may have moved closer or further away to compensate for the varying lens lengths.

Most of these photos will NOT have been edited, as they were taken for the purposes of this lesson, and it is more useful to see them as they are, rather than with blur added to the background or other things done to change the original look of the scene.

Puck's Glen

This first set of images comes from Puck’s Glen in Scotland. I loved the location but it was extremely difficult as there was no real way to move around – I could really only take the photo from one position. This meant the 35mm included way too much of the scene and the dogs got a bit lost in it… the 85mm had lovely bokeh but a lot of the scene was cut out (though later I would end up making panoramas here).

In the end I liked the 50mm best here! You can see the final chosen and edited image below.

 

Puck's Glen 2

This was a beautiful little backlit glade, but I just couldn’t quite make it work how I saw it.

I wanted to show the general size and shape of this place, but again the 35mm felt too busy and “flat” for me. I made a panorama of 6 images with the 85mm instead, to get the whole scene included, but also to get it with beautiful bokeh and compression. Below is the single image of Journey with the 85mm, and then the stitched panorama version. This scene may have worked with the 50mm but I’d forgotten I had it with me at this point!

Puck's Glen 3

This was another beautiful spot in the Glen that was very difficult to capture how I wanted to. There were such limited places I could stand before I was falling off a cliff.

Once again, I found that the 35mm included TOO much, and the dog was totally lost in this scene. The 50mm was better, and the 85mm cut out a lot of the scene, making it lose some of its charm.

In the end I ended up making a 10-piece panorama image (see it below) but it’s all a bit much for me! I still couldn’t get close enough to my subject to really get enough detail on him – from the distance I had to stand, he’s really quite pixelated.

Trossachs National Park

This was a pretty simple “tunnel between trees” beside a road but I saw it had massive potential.

While I was there I decided to take several images with different lenses for the point of comparison, though I knew I would only want to use my 135mm for this, for that creamy soft bokeh.

For these examples I tried to have the dog the same size in the frame, and I think it is a brilliant example of how compression changes throughout the focal lengths: from heaps and heaps of distracting, busy bright spots, to the perfect, soft, creamy tunnel of light that I had envisaged. 

I ended up creating a small 2 image panorama. The final edit is shown below.

Castle

As you can see, this was a super sunny bright day, so I really only took these photos of examples of some different lenses in this more landscape situation. I’m sure you can imagine how the 135mm would have looked – all of the background would have been filled with the castle.

In this one, I stayed in the same spot for each photo starting with the 85mm, so you get a sense of how each one looks without moving closer to the dogs, except for the last image taken with the 35mm, where I moved closer.

Learn to Crawl Before You Walk (the importance of foundations)

Quick story. For the first part of my time as primary/elementary school teacher, I worked with “Foundations” students – those in their first year of school. I taught them how to read, write and count and then sent them on their way to bigger and better things. Every single one of those kids had begun somewhere, although all of them came in to school with different levels of understandings. One child could read Harry Potter when he began with us. Another knew the ABCs but had no idea of how that related to anything more than a catchy song. 

The fact is, without learning first to “read the pictures”, then recognise letters and the sounds those letters make, and putting the sounds together to make words, and the words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs…. they never could have explained to me the implied meaning behind a character’s actions, or enjoyed reading a new novel, or critically deconstructed bias in a newspaper.

They had to crawl before they could walk. 

And the same goes for photography (or any skill.)

I believe that you can’t edit your photos to be spectacular works of art until you know how to use different lighting conditions, take photos at the right angle and with good composition and so on. The basics. The foundations. The stuff behind the camera that hours of editing (usually) can’t fix.

 

Mastering anything takes time, practise, failure, analysis, and more practise.

Think about the last time you learnt something new – I don’t just mean the last time you attended a work conference that you only half-paid attention to the whole way through, or a regular class that you daydream during and pretend to take notes. I mean something you were passionate about and eager to learn? When we feel like this, we have such a rush to learn and put our new skills to the test, and get to the end point… but remember…

it’s all about the journey.

Student Journey

Don't rush!

 

 

 

In this day and age of instant gratification, we are so quick to jump ahead without mastering the basics, excited to get to “the sexy stuff” (in this case, to get to Photoshop as quickly as possible!).

 My advice to you, therefore, is to take time on the foundations. To work steadily through this course. To make notes. To get your camera out and take hundreds, or thousands of photos. To fail. To mess up the lighting, the focus, the composition, the pose, the expression… and to try again. 

A photo with strong foundations can stand on its own with only basic edits, and still be a strong photo. It can be a magical photo with advanced editing techniques.

A photo without these basic concepts will, in my opinion, always fall flat. Despite all the editing in the world.

To prove my point, below are a few photos – before & afters – which I edited using only the basic tools in Lightroom, the same tools that you can find on any editing program or app. No radial filters or anything fancy. No Photoshop. Just global (whole picture) adjustments to the different shades of light, colour, and contrast.

Are these photos as stunning and eye-catching as mine normally are? No. Are they still quality photos? I think so, yes.

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Before

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After

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After

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After

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After

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Before

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After

How to Navigate this Course

In all the courses, you will find the navigation menu for the course to the left. Here you can jump through the various lessons. 

  • The Inspawration logo will return you to your “Dashboard”
  • Below this is a google translate plugin, which will translate the text of the lesson into your language.
  • Some lessons also include “topics” – think of them as sub-lessons, or add-ons to the main lesson. You can click on the “topics” button to see the lessons included there. 
  • Each lesson will have navigational arrows at the bottom, as well as an option to “mark complete” when you’ve finished it, so you can keep track of your progress.
  • Each lesson will have a combination of video, text, and occasionally resources to download. There are areas for comments and questions at the foot of each lesson. I will answer questions as soon as I can.
  • Unfortunately at the moment, due to the hosting platform of the videos, they do not offer automatic closed captioning or translation. I hope to transcribe the videos in the future, but I hope that for the moment, the text component of the lesson will help you to follow along.
  • Some lessons will have special challenges or assignments for Learning Community members to post to the closed Facebook group, so keep an eye out for those!

You may also see Professor Loks (aka. Professor Snoot) and his studious student Journey around the course...

Professor Snoot
Professor Loks will usually give you handy hints, tips, and things to remember.
Student Journey
Student Journey is an inquisitive fellow, so he'll be asking questions, getting you to think about your work or your knowledge, to further help you learn.

Choosing a Camera

Best Camera & Lenses for Beginners

This lesson is pretty text-heavy. Apologies in advance, but apart from random photos of random things I’m not too sure how to spice it up!

There are hundreds of different cameras and lenses out there, spanning over the past 2, 5, 10 years, of all different budgets and abilities and strengths and weaknesses. I know it can be overwhelming to have to choose one. Unfortunately I’m not really going to be able to make your job too much easier – I know about pet photography, but I’m not a camera make and model expert by any meant.

Read through the suggestions below, make a list of features or functions you need, then if you can, go to a store, so you can actually handle cameras. Some are much bigger and bulkier than others. 

Professor Snoot

Mirrorless or DSLR

Have a think about whether you want a mirrorless or DSLR. There’s a ton of info out there on both, but essentially, a traditional DSLR has a small mirror in the body that flips when you press the shutter, reflecting the image to the sensor. Because of this, when you look through the viewfinder, you (usually) just see the scene as it is, not necessarily with the exposure based on the settings you’ve chosen. Some (many) new DSLRs have an option to turn on “live view” which shows essentially a movie of the scene, with your exposure settings applied. Sometimes the frames per second of DSLRs can be slower, as they have to constantly flip a mirror. That are usually a bit bigger and bulkier, but a bit more robust, with a wide selection of lenses, and better battery life.

 

A mirrorless camera is usually a smaller body, as there’s no mirror inside. Through the viewfinder and on the back of the camera, you are constantly seeing a movie projection of the scene including your exposure settings, so you know how light or dark your image will be when you take it. This can drain the battery faster than traditional DSLRs.  Because there’s no mirror, their autofocus can be quicker, and for whatever reason, mirrorless cameras tend to work a bit better in low light conditions. I personally have a mirrorless and I love it. 

Jump on google images and search for “Mirrorless and DSLR” and you’ll see plenty of cameras side by side, to get a sense of the size.

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Here is my small camera with my small lens. It also has a flip-out screen which is so helpful.

"Crop sensor" or Full Frame?

 Some entry level cameras are called “Crop sensors”. I don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of this because I don’t think it’s necessary, but basically a crop sensor is a smaller sensor, meaning your camera sees less of the scene (which is again compressed depending on the length of your lens). What does it mean for you? Not that much, really. It will change the distance you’ll need to be from your subject with the lenses you use compared to someone using those same lenses on a full frame camera… you may get slightly less narrow depth of field/blurred background/bokeh with a crop sensor… but that’s pretty marginal. So do your research here and see if there’s a real benefit for you going FF or not. That being said, most hobbiests who want to get more serious do move from crop to FF after a while. 

Low Light Capability

In my opinion and experience, this is something you want to look into for our kind of photography.

Especially since we might want photos at dusk, on overcast days, in the woods, or even indoors. How well your camera can perform under low light conditions and how good its dynamic range is, can really affect what kinds of photos we can take and how much flexibility we have. I want to be able to take photos over ISO 1000 (more on ISO in the following lessons) without them immediately becoming destroyed. But! If you’re just taking photos of dogs at a dog park, or in your back yard, this mightn’t be such a priority.

Dynamic range is also tied to low light capabilities. You’ll see a lot of my “before” images are very dark, but I know I can lighten them without too much trouble as my camera has good dynamic range so it saves a lot of information even in the dark parts of the image. Some cameras (the Canon 7dmkii for example) don’t keep the data in the shadows so well, so when you try and lighten the image, it might get ruined/noisy/grainy more quickly. 

This is a before & after image I shot recently. I had to expose the image this way in order to keep all the detail in the clouds, and the colour in the sky, but my boys and I are very nearly black! Because my camera has great dynamic range, I could raise the shadows a lot to bring detail back into those very dark areas, but even my camera found this difficult in this case – resulting in a lot of noise on the finished image! If my camera HADN’T been so good at retaining detail in the dark areas, it would have been an absolute disaster.

Speed & action shots

If you want to do action photos regularly, or photos of puppies or dogs just moving about, a camera which can focus, take many photos quickly, and track a subject with accuracy is going to be more important than if you’re getting a camera to take photos of your couch-potato pups.

The question you need to ask yourself here is: how much serious action photography am I planning to do?

A few shots of a dog running toward you every now and then is very different to wanting to take photos at the local agility club every single weekend. Dogs moving at speed (think border collies running, any kind of speedy agility dogs, etc) need a very good autofocus system – better than most human/portrait photographers would consider good. 

So if you’re looking for something which can seriously handle actual action photography, take most camera recommendations on what is “good” for action with a grain of salt.

I would consider this "gentle action"
This is much faster, much more intense, and much more difficult.

Other considerations

  • Do you already have some gear? If you already have a large collection of one brand of lenses, you might wish to stay with that brand. 
  • Film/movies. Will you be taking a lot of movies with your camera?
  • Animal-Eye Autofocus. Everyone is going crazy over this feature now that it’s out there. My camera has it. It identifies where the dog’s eye is and theoretically focuses on it. I still use a single point AF and still move it over the dog’s eye. I figure it can’t hurt to have two focus systems both looking for the eye. And even then it isn’t correct 100% of the time. I would worry that relying too heavily on Animal-Eye AF could lead to some missed shots if the camera is making all the decisions.
  • Different types of focus detection (you’ll see Phase AF, Contrast AF, and I don’t even know what else these days.) I’m sure each different method has different pros and cons.
  • Weather sealing. Are you likely to take photos on rainy days? You may wish to get a camera which is weather-sealed.
  • Articulating/flip screen. This is actually a big one for me, and Sony’s screen isn’t even that great. I LOVE that I can flip the screen out, kneel on the ground and still see how the shot is composed. With cameras that don’t have a flip out screen, you may need to be lying on your belly very often. 
  • WiFi & NFC capability. I rarely send images from my camera to my phone or computer via anything but the SD card. However, I do like that I can control the camera via a remote on my iPhone, meaning I can take self-portraits and see the composition before I take the photo with the phone’s remote shutter release. 
  • Touch screen? Some people love touch screens. Probably a good feature for beginners, as you an set the focus point by tapping the screen. I don’t use mine. 
  • Colour profiles. There’s some debate around different colour profiles amongst brands. A lot of Canon people hate Sony’s colour. I figure I can fix any colour with white balance adjustment so I’m not sure what the big deal is, but some people swear black and blue that Sony’s colour is awful. Make up your own mind here I guess.