We saw this post on photographing aniamls online and thought it might be helpful for people in the rescue world: http://www.blackpearldogs.com/photographing.html. The page is very well thought out and full of great information. Some ideas include using light to make dogs look happier and more cheerful as well as to elicit emotion, in addition to using certain backgrounds to have specific effects.
We can’t say enough about how much more time and energy need to be put into rescue photographs. An individual can easily fall in love and want to rescue a dog just from a photograph, so the better the pictures the greater the chance an animal has of being rescued. Rescues spend surprisingly little time on the pictures, descriptions of the dogs, and updates relative to how much time they spend rescuing them. Most sites have one or two pictures at most. We are starting to see some rescues do more videos and as everyone gets smart phones with cameras and video cameras, the rescue community is bound to make progress.