You guys, you guys, you guys! I'm so excited, can you tell?! We just got in three new hand-painted canvas backdrops. What does that mean? Vanity Fair/Annie Leibovitz styled pet portraits!

The colors are brown, blue and green and they are completely awesome. No, these are not your daddy's Old World Masters backdrops. These are very contemporary and make for extremely dramatic portraits. They really fit well in a styled shoot or a formal portrait. They are made by Gravity Backdrops and they came all the way from Serbia.

Now, for this kind of look, I have photographed on gray or dark blue seamless paper and added on a texture and it kind of mimics it. But the seamless doesn't have the depth the painted canvas has. Plus, if you're doing a lot of textures, you'd have a lot of post-processing to do. Not these. Well, photography always involved post-processing, but not having to put on a texture is nice.

I immediately enlisted the help of Kiwi to help model these. In fact, I gave mister a bath that morning and boy, was he not happy. But I wanted him to look nice for a more formal look and after all, he wears a tuxedo 24/7. Kiwi is now five years old and because he isn't allowed to run around outside unsupervised (we got him from the pound because he was a stray... don't want that to happen on our watch), he's getting a little portlier than when we first got him. Well, he was a skinny stray.

We tried to coax Mango to have a portrait done but no dice. I know, I publish so many of Kiwi on Instagram (what, you don't know I'm on Instagram? www.instagram.com/dlundin) but Mango doesn't have the more playful personality Kiwi does and he just wasn't having his portrait taken that day. Two attempts at the stool and we threw in the towel.

Now, I also got some cool stools and props for our magazine style shoot. Want the look? Give me a call, 818.481.5214. You'll be the talk of the town.