I'd Been Doing This Wrong for Twenty Years (Just Kidding, Sort Of)
It started with a golden retriever named Buffy
I grew up as an only child, which probably sounds like it was lonely, but it wasn't. I had Buffy.
Buffy was a Golden Retriever, and she was not my pet, she was my sibling. She was the one I came home to, the one I processed my days with, the one who was present for all of it, with that specific animal generosity that humans honestly can’t compete with.
What she gave me, without either of us realizing it, was a language. The language of animals. She taught me the way a dog’s whole body shifts when it’s nervous versus when it’s performing nervousness for your benefit. She taught me the difference between a dog that’s happy to see you and a dog that’s happy to see you specifically. Buffy taught me the thousand tiny signals that fly under the radar if you’re not tuned to the right frequency.
I learned all of that before I was old enough to know I was learning anything. It just became part of how I moved through the world.
Why yes, this was the 80s, why do you ask?
I spent twenty years photographing the wrong species
Okay, that’s not totally true. I spent twenty years photographing humans, and I got very good at it. Weddings, portraits, families, performers, I understood how to find the real moment inside the posed one, how to put people at ease, how to wait for the frame that told the truth.
But underneath all of it, there was always this quiet knowledge. A little whisper in the background. I want to work with animals. Engagement session? Great - do you have a dog you want to include? Wedding with a dog ring-bearer? I’m your photographer, no doubt.
I called it graduating, but one day, something just clicked. The timing was right, the clarity was there, and I stopped ignoring the whispers. I pointed my camera at dogs and cats and didn’t look back. Twenty years of craft, redirected at the subjects I was always supposed to be focusing on. (Pun always intended.)
“I called it graduating. The whisper had been there my whole career. I finally stopped ignoring it.”
Here’s what I think happens when photographers don’t speak animal
I’ll be honest - I’ve never personally experienced it, because I’ve never not had this fluency. I came into this work already knowing the language. But I’ve heard enough from clients, and I’ve thought enough about it, to have a pretty good idea about what could go sideways.
Patience runs out. That’s the big one. Animal photography is not a game you can force. A dog is not going to hold a smile on command. A cat is not going to care that you’re on a schedule. If a photographer doesn’t genuinely understand animals - doesn’t feel them, doesn’t read them - frustration creeps in, and animals feel that. They clock it immediately and respond accordingly, which means the energy in the session goes wrong and the photos go with it.
The other thing that gets lost is the pivot. Animal sessions require constant, fluid adjustment. What was working thirty seconds ago may not be working now. You have to be willing to throw out the plan, read what the animal is giving you, and follow that instead. Photographers who don’t know animals tend to push harder toward the original plan instead of letting the session be what it wants to be.
Clients often thank me for being so patient with their pets. I honestly don’t even have to try. It’s innate, it’s part of the language.
The Sally incident, or: Leashes Stay On
I should tell you about Sally - not her real name to protect the “innocent”.
We were up at Kenosha Pass, it was a Monday, so it was just us. Five humans, two dogs, spectacular mountain light. Perfect conditions. Her human said “She’s fine without a leash for a little bit” and Sally, a dog with strong opinions and apparently excellent turkey-detection instincts, found a wild turkey under a bush and made an immediate executive decision to chase it a quarter mile down the mountain.
What followed was five adults sprinting down a Colorado mountainside, yelling “SALLY!! SALLY!”, while Sally conducted what I can only describe as an instinctive wildlife encounter.
We got her back. Everyone was fine. The turkey, I assume, had a story to tell.
Here’s what I took from it: no matter how well you know animals, the environment is always a variable. I do this work in the wild, in the unpredictable, in the real conditions where your pet actually lives, and that means things go sideways sometimes, and that means I have to be someone who can handle sideways with a calm head and a good attitude and ideally a little humor about it.
No matter what anyone says, leashes stay on now. Lesson officially learned.
The moment I know the work matters
I keep a box of tissues in my studio for a reason.
When I do a gallery reveal - when a client sits down and sees their photos for the first time - I have watched people cry through the entire slideshow. Not sad crying, but something else. The kind of crying that happens when you see something true about someone you love and you didn’t expect to see it so clearly.
That’s what I’m after. Not pretty photos, though they are pretty. Not technically correct images, though they’re that too. I’m after the moment where your dog is entirely, completely, unmistakably themselves. Where you look at it and go: yes. that’s them, that’s exactly who they are. That moment exists in every session. My job is to be patient enough, fluent enough, and present enough to catch it.
Why this is my calling and not just my job
On the hard days - gear malfunctions, tricky light, a particularly stubborn cat who has decided that today is simply not a photography day - I never have to dig for a reason to keep going. It’s already there. It lives somewhere in my soul, probably installed there by a Golden Retriever named Buffy when I was young enough to absorb it completely.
This is what I was always supposed to do. The twenty years of photographing humans were real and valuable and I don’t regret them - but this is the thing I was built for. Working with animals, earning their trust, capturing the specific truth of who they are for the humans who love them most.
I know it the way you know things that are too true to explain.
If you’ve read this far, you probably already feel it — that your pet deserves photos that actually look like exactly who they are. Not a generic good dog photo. Them. That’s exactly what I’m here to make. Let’s talk.