Pet Photos at dusk

Maggie and I went down to her parents house for a relaxing weekend, and to drop off our wild child Sky (The mini-Aussie) for week-long summer camp.  I brought my camera and took some pictures while we were there.  I ended up spending an evening getting pictures of the dogs in the evening light.  It's always difficult to get nice crisp in-focus shots of pets, since they usually don't stop long enough for a photo.  The best way I've found is to let them play until they feel like stopping long enough for a breather.  Fortunately, with 3 dogs chasing each other and a river with sticks to throw, they tend to wear themselves out.  Shooting in evening light is nice; no harsh shadows from direct sunlight, and I don't have to wake up at 4:30am to shoot with dawn light. :)  I used my 50mm F1.4 lens to get a better/shallow depth of field (the amount of the image that can be in or out of focus).  It helped drop the background out of focus and draw the attention to the face of the dogs. The next issue is not making the depth of field too narrow.  I have to be careful not to choose too large of an aperture to keep the depth of field large enough to get the nose-to-ear in focus. I used an aperture of f2 to f2.8.  This way, the focus depth is enough for the face of the dog to look good, and the ISO can still be pretty low even in the dimmer dusk light to keep the final image nice and clean.  I still had some problems trying to hold the camera still enough at around 1/80th shutter speed; Sky's picture isn't quite as crisp as I would have liked, but it's still a nice portrait.