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OK, so after lurking here for a while, I'm taking the plunge and asking for some advice on my photos. I really enjoy pet photography, but I feel that there is so much room for improvement that I need as much help as I can get. I have no intention of doing anything commertial, I just enjoy it and want to get (much!) better. I am fairly new to photography as a whole and would really appreciate any feedback from the people on this forum, who's work I really admire. I am also new to reducing images for the web (but still maintaining some of the original quality), so any help there would also be greatly appreciated!
Inside shot of Staffie and BC.

A fairly rough and ready attempt at a "studio" type set up using two off camera flashes. I later learnt (here!) that the normal bulb I was using to assist focusing was creating the color cast and the lighting (shadows) was all wrong.

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Sam,

Certainly a very nice first posting.

Here are my suggestions for improvement. As you pointed out, there is a problem with the lighting for the first "studio" image. If you hadn't said you were using two flashes, I would have thought this was a single flash set up. The light is pretty harsh from one side and the second flash isn't really filling the dark areas. Shooting black animals is always a challenge (you can read a couple of posts here about that subject). For dark animals you really need to balance the light across the subject and a little diffusion can help. I would recommend experimenting with moving your lights around to get the effect you want. I would also recommend a couple of small umbrellas. All is not lost even though the set up wasn't optimal. I think you will find that producing good images is dependent on good camera work and also good post processing. If you really want to get the images you want, you are going to have to jump in and improve your post processing skills. The suboptimal lighting in this image can be corrected with a little work in post process. I also think that the crop you went with gives me a little unbalanced feeling with the leg protruding out of frame. I went with a tighter crop on the right. Here is a example in which I tried to bring up more shadow detail. I also made sure there was enough detail in both eyes of the pooch on the left.

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Outside shot of 3 BCs
My own problems here are the leg and tail hanging off the seat that spoils the composition, as well as the grass in the one dogs tail (I could clone out, but my PS skills are shaky at best.)
Sorry for such a long first post. Please don't worry about being polite - I really need to see where I am going wrong!

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Nothing wrong with the composition on this one. Great looking dogs. I agree that the foot is a problem. The solution goes back to the fact that good post processing skills can save the day. This is really a trivial cloning excercise. The art of cloning is just a trial and error process which I think is well worth the effort in learning. Here is the "cleaned up" image: