Girls love their horses

On a recent trip I was able to capture some horse-action at a local riding club, where young teenage girls (where were the boys??) performed with their horses at a dressage trial. The girls take this task very serious and stress levels are high. Performances vary, of course, but the overall atmosphere of the event captivates riders and their families.

While the trials are of course interesting and what people come for, the side action is just as much fun:

If you're looking for a photographer for your local riding trials in Vancouver and the lower mainland, contact us and we are happy to provide you with a proposal.

Making a portrait session fun!

A portrait session of your dog can be a lot of fun, if you are participating. This is what I found out on a recent portrait session with Caroline and her Doberman Resi and horse Comet.

Caroline wanted action photos of her dog at a local creek. She also was after nice portraits of herself and Resi as well as Comet that she could frame.

We started at the creek and admittedly I was a little worried about lighting. We chose the mid-afternoon when I was expecting the sun to shine onto the creek as I was hoping for fast shutter speeds. It worked!

A Doberman as retriever!

What I had not expected is that Caroline was up for the challenge and wanted to participate in the shoot to the extend as she did. This made the shoot so much fun and the image selection extremely large.

A great team!

Now Caroline has the difficult task to select her favourite images from the great variety.

But the funny part is to catch the many mimics that keep making me laugh as I look at the images and work in post-production. Priceless!

Who is kissing whom?

And again?

What to learn from this - be open on a photo shoot and you end up having a great number of wonderful images to choose from and lots of fun memories!

Contact us for your personal consultation!

Family portraiture

I recently had the opportunity to photograph a family of four. A rather sophisticated gentleman, an exuberant lady and two little ones, both girls. A wonderful portrait opportunity!

The Lechner dog family!

Every time I show this picture I am asked - how did you get them to sit still? Did you glue them down? Of course not!!! I worked with these dogs for about 2 hours and there was a constant change of the primary subjects. I created beautiful portraits of the individual dogs but also many funny group shots. As you can see, the dogs were very cooperative!
My recipe is to work with the dogs and not to expect of them to work with me. Then things seem to fall in place. If the dogs are calmer in demeanour it usually is easier to achieve but usually most dogs at one stage seem to just be natural models.

Fany - my secret favourite!

Spike - only adopted the day before the shoot!

Bambi - the big baby

Paula - the boss!

Working with four dogs at the same time gave me the opportunity to create many different images. An ideal situation for creating an album or wall display. The individual portraits are wonderful in full colour or monochrome and I think Sabine found it hard to choose.

Three dogs comfortable with each other

Capture the moment!

I wonder what he is telling her!

If you want to have an offer for a photo shoot of your family - let us know! Fun families like this one will always get preferential treatment!

Creating light!

For a change I pointed my camera at people. And not just any people - at models.... As part of a lighting workshop taught by Don Giannatti right here in Vancouver.

It was a lot of fun and I am sure many of the tips will make their way into my everyday pet photography. I thoroughly enjoyed a day full of creativity and hope you enjoy the outcome:

I really liked the creativity. Working in small teams with the objective that everyone creates different images was a challenge that for me opened the creative flow. Day 1 was tough theory, day 2 was fun experimentation.