Hi Jennifer
What I have found recently, in taking pictures of my new 'family' - children and adults alike - is that a feature of my digital camera comes in really useful.
The camera [Canon Ixus 750] has reasonable resolution - 7 megapixels - actually I de-tune it to 4 because otherwise I'd have no hard disk space left when i store the pictures - I have almost filled a 500 gigabyte hard drive this past year....
The special thing though is the movie mode, which is DVD quality. With a 2 gigabyte SD card in it, I can take good amounts of video with sound. Better actually than my digital camcorder can do!
What I do is take short bursts of video of the people at best picture setting, then I play back the video on the PC, stop it at a particular point, Print Screen, then crop and save it from my picture editor.
The picture size is limited of course, but certainly good enough for 6 x 4 prints, and great for making DVDs with soundtracks.
The images selected from the video are far more like the people being captured than still images taken as such are.
Now, I didn't do all this when I was owned by Nikolai Vronsky, our fine Russian Blue cat, so I don't know if it would work for pets. I'd give it a try though.
Nicky - and his companion Caradoc, the Blue Abyssinian, were great posers though, so didn't want me to do anything other than take their pictures so others could admire them....
This picture I took when they were under a year old, in 1995, when Jan was only just starting on our terrible journey.