For years, I've been telling my clients  "Get in the photo with your dog. I don't care if you hate your smile, your outfit, or anything else. One day, that photo will bring you comfort. It will be a physical and emotional reminder that you loved this animal, and this animal loved you back.

I have said some version of that sentence probably a thousand times.

I have never once taken my own advice.

I'm the photographer. Being invisible behind the camera is where I'm comfortable. I know what I'm doing back there. Nobody is looking at me and deciding whether I photograph well, which, for the record, I don't think I do. So every session I've ever shot of my own three dogs, Ollie, Roscoe, and Zoey, I'm the one holding the camera. Never in the frame.

This year I finally hired someone to point it at me instead.

I had a picture in my head of exactly how it would go. Formal portrait. Fine art style, the kind you print large and hang where people will see it. Me and my three dogs, together, composed, looking like the family we actually are. In ten years and tens of thousands of photos of my own dogs, I didn't have a single one that proved we belonged to each other.

We got 3 minutes through the session before a treat hit the floor.

The dogs went for it at the same time, and not politely. It turned into a real scuffle, the kind where you stop everything and physically separate them. But that didn't stop the photographer. In the middle of that, the camera was still going.

This  photo, the one from the thirty seconds where everything fell apart, is the only picture we have of all four of us together.

It's also my favorite.

Not because it's polished. It's the opposite of polished. But it's the the one moment that actually looks like life often feels. I remember the sequence of it exactly. Shock, then relief that everyone was fine, then laughing hard enough that I could barely hold still for the next sequence of shots.

We did get a few images closer to what I originally pictured, and I love those too. But none of them tell the truth the way that one does.

This is the same thing I tell clients before every session, especially the ones with dogs who don't sit still, don't listen on cue, or have never once looked at a camera on purpose. I'm not trying to manufacture a perfect moment. I'm trying to be ready when the real one shows up, because the real one is almost always better than what anyone planned.

I just never expected to learn that lesson about myself, standing in my own studio, laughing at my own dogs.

If you've been putting off getting in a photo with your pet because you don't love how you photograph, I understand that completely. I'm not exactly the poster child for confidence in front of a camera either.

Get in the photo anyway. Your pet doesn't need you to look perfect. They need you in the frame, next to them, so that someday there's proof this whole thing happened.

If you'd like to experience a Moments Unleashed Pet Photography Experience,  I'd love to chat. 

ME & MY Dogs

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