For those who’ve been around for a while, you may remember my photography origin story. Spoiler alert: I didn’t start with photographing pets.

Photographing pets wasn’t where I started

Unlike a lot of photographers, I didn’t get into photography until I was in my 30s. (Here’s where you comment how I couldn’t possibly be older than 29 years old!) I started when I was working on my sociology PhD and decided it would be fun to photograph clowns as part of my dissertation. (For those of you afraid of clowns, don’t worry. I have no clue what happened to those images so won’t be sharing them!) I took some photography classes at my local community college, just to get more familiar with the camera equipment. Then I kept taking classes and getting more into it. Eventually I just kind of “fell” into business and when I started I was primarily photographing high school seniors and families. Although I was a pet lover, I had no clue I could actually make a living photographing them.

Then in 2017 I started volunteering at City Dogs, the adoption arm of the Cleveland Kennel. There was someone there doing amazing photos and once he found out I had a DSLR camera, he recruited me to help. After a bare-bones tutorial on how to photograph dogs, I was off and running! Eventually he quit volunteering there and I took over as the primary photographer, which then led into transforming my photography business.

My plea to you: Get in the photos!

But that’s not really what this blog is about. Rather, I’m here to encourage you to get into the photos with your pets. When I started photographing pets, I didn’t include a lot of humans in the photos. Because my start in pet photography was photographing adoptable dogs, I just wasn’t used to including the humans. Additionally, although I got my start in photography by capturing images of humans, I still wasn’t confident about my ability to pose people.

What I eventually realized, though, is that when you get into the images with your pets, it ends up being more about your relationship with them as opposed to proper posing. When I do convince people to hop into the photos, I generally just tell them to do whatever they would normally do with their pet. Then, the images come almost naturally.

These days I tend to start sessions with asking the humans if they want to be in some images with their pets. Some say yes (especially for those with pets nearing the end of their earthly existence), but many humans claim that they aren’t camera ready, aren’t their ideal weight, never look good in photos, etc. I’m here to tell you that when you are looking back on these images after your beloved pet is gone, you’re not going to see any of that. But you will see that you weren’t in the photo.

I understand these reservations. They are the same ones I say any time someone asks me to jump in a photo as well. But it’s important that you show your relationship through these photos. After all, you are paying a professional to take these images — you might as well get as much out of the experience as you can!

Personal examples of getting into the photos with my pets

You may have seen the above image before. It’s been on my website and I’ve blogged about it. In short, this is an image of me with my heart dog, Lance. I took this image in 2022, shortly after I moved into my studio space.

I brought Lance to the studio primarily to get some images of him. He was about 14 years old and hadn’t been doing well physically for a while. I knew the time to say goodbye was nearing. I had no intention of getting in any images with him. But after doing his images, we decided to just hang out on the ground snuggling. It was in that moment that I knew I wanted to get in some images with him. So I set my camera on a tripod, set up the lights, and used my phone to fire the camera. We got a few images together, but this one has by far been the image I recall when I think about Lance. He passed about 2 weeks later. However, remembering us looking at one another like this is the overarching memory that sticks.

After Lance, I made it a point to jump in photos with my pets. Here are a few examples:

If you are interested in seeing more images of pets with their people check out my website. I’ve been consciously trying to not only capture more of these images, but also showcase them. And if you schedule a session with me, I’ve now worked it into my pre-session workflow to ask if you want to be in the images. My hope is that it will at least get you thinking about it. I will still honor your wishes if you say no, but it doesn’t mean I won’t still ask at the actual session!

Ready to schedule your own session? Visit my contact page to set something up!