I belong to HeartsSpeak, an organization that encourages photographers to help shelter pets find their new homes by having the animals become visible through imagery. On July 13, HeartsSpeak, Los Angeles County Animal Care Centers, Rita Earl Photography and Shelter Me embarked on a unique collaboration called Seen=Saved Los Angeles that enabled every single adoptable animal in the LA County shelters to be photographed by 200 photographers. And for that weekend, adoption fees were waived!I immediately signed up when it was announced, I was so excited. I've photographed many adoptable animals in the past and my hope, along with everyone else's hope, is that the images would help these animals ...

Wow, what a fabulous time we had last Saturday at our Days of Whine and Rosés event at a downtown Los Angeles photo studio! It was so much fun with expert sommelier Brianne Cohen pouring a number of specially curated rosés and me photographing dogs in a rosé-themed setting. And pink bubbly all day!This is what I hope to do for you guys... design a fun activity that you can do with your dogs AND get a photo shoot out of it. Right?!? So let me know if you have some ideas (I have a lot) or you can subscribe to my newsletter for details of when I throw another one.Oh wait, before I say more about the Whine and Rosé event, did you know that Yelp now includes a feature ...

Quite often when I say I do pet photography composites I'm met with a blank stare. It's just simply that a lot of people don't really know what a composite is. What seems like such a natural word in my world may as well be another language to someone else. So I'm going to break it down a bit.In general, with compositing, you are creating a scene with with at least two elements that weren't photographed together. Now the end results can be for different things. Say I did a pet photography shoot with three dogs. Two are looking at the camera, one isn't. Or there is a family of a large number of animals but it's pretty difficult to wrangle them all together. In this case, I can swap out heads ...

I wouldn't say I went kicking and screaming into automating my gift certificates... I would say I had to find the right way to do it and I think I found it. I just started offering gift certificates you can literally buy from a link on this site. Hey, getting smart in my old age.Gift certificates start at $350 and that enables your recipient to get their pet photography session and their choice their choice of $100 off the purchase of wall art or an album, or two 8x10s, or one 11x14. Pretty good, it gives them options (by the way, I don't sell GCs unless they include a product because there's nothing worse than getting a gift and finding out your holding the bag on all purchases). Have you ...