Squirrel!!!!

I was contacted by one of my favourite clients a month or so ago and asked if I would take some pet pictures of their stunning Pointer breed dogs, mother and daughter Imola and Monza. It’s a bit of a change to the product and car photography I show, but they are great people so I said "sure" 🙂

We discussed the details on what the images were for (a large high-key print/canvas) and I suggested we also did some shots of them just being dogs and playing in the local park as a nice contrast to the posed shots. Everything was set and so we watched the weather and a couple of weeks later the conditions turned to our favour.

I rolled up outside the house with Prabha (girlfriend and pooch fanatic) as my assistant and a 1/2 sized studio setup in the boot. For the ‘studio’ style shots there was just enough room to set up a small backlit background and train, a front light plus a little ‘CallumW special‘ to crisp them up a little 😉

The stage was set.

There’s an old saying never to work with kids or animals, but I have to say that both pooches were extremely well behaved. They were easily transfixed with the promise of biscuits and "coochycoos" from both their owner and Prabha.
Both of them were so well behaved and so adorable, I think Prabha was eyeing one of my bags to see if she could smuggle one of them home (just kidding :))

After the formal setup we headed to the park to let them loose.

A short while back I blogged about the JDM Drift cars that I photographed sliding past at speed, but seriously, they have nothing on these guys. Man these dogs are faaaast.

‘meep! meep!’ … blink …. you’ve missed them.
Needless to say there were a few shots where they were flying out of frame before I could track them. So quick … and unpredictable. At least cars follow the track (usually) and are consistent in speed.
These guys … forget it 😀

After a short time (but not before they both went for a swim in the lake) the light began dropping which meant I was struggling to keep the shutter speed up high enough, so we got them to pose for us in a few remaining pools of light to add some variety in style.

We headed back and I packed up my mini studio and we said our farewells.
Both pooches were wiped out from all the running, but you could see they had a great day.

If that’s a dog’s life then where do I sign 🙂

A few semi-edited shots below so you can see how adorable they are 🙂