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 ...

India, a white Doberman, is the star of this little triptych. What an expressive face, wouldn't you agree?India is the second white Doberman I've photographed. Most people think she's a Weimaraner, says her mom Leslie. And come to think of it, the other white Doberman I photographed, Sam, was also mistaken for a Weimaraner, but nope, both are Dobermans. Dobies come in five shades... black, red, fawn, blue and white and white is the least common. They sometimes have some health problems and to be honest, India doesn't see that well. But she is a master of expressions.  

We wrapped up our annual holiday shoot at Maxwell Dog in Studio City and one of our favorites -- okay, we have no favorites, they were all so cute -- was Winston, the Frenchie. Winston is hard of hearing. Deaf, really. So the way we get a dog's attention is with sound and in this case sound wasn't going to work. We had to resort to Plan B, which is why you should always have a Plan B. Plan Peanut Butter. Yep, we whipped out the peanut butter for dogs (you didn't know there was such a thing?) and we managed to get Winston's attention that way. Needless to say, we had a lot of Winston licking his chops. So that's when I decided to make this collage of his tongue poses. His mom Shelly loved it ...