It Started with Prom Dresses - How I Became A Pet Photographer
I got my first real job at thirteen years old. I didn't know it at the time, but it would shape the entire trajectory of my life.
I was selling prom dresses.
The store also carried couture bridal gowns, and by sixteen I was the top bridal salesperson on the floor and managing the bridal side of the business entirely. I worked part-time through college. I was good at it — at understanding what someone wanted before they knew how to say it, at helping people see themselves differently than they walked in.
In 2007 the shop owner launched a nationwide advertising agency, and I came with her. Our competitive advantage was a custom 116-page magazine featuring designer prom dresses, mailed directly to more than half a million high school girls across the country. I traveled the US meeting with designers, selecting models, planning massive photo shoots, and then spending two grueling weeks of 20-hour days in July in Georgia every summer photographing dresses. The rest of the year ran at 60-hour weeks minimum.
I was good at that too.
Then Comes Marriage
Ready for the plot twist?
We were traveling all summer — New York, Fort Myers, Memphis, Chicago — and my boss didn't want to leave her two small children home alone. She convinced her sister to take vacation time and come along to watch the kids.
That sister was Renee.
We'd both be up early in the mornings while everyone else was still asleep, drinking coffee and watching the news before my day of prom dresses and her day of museums and landmarks would start. I started to get to know her. Really know her.
Renee and I went on our first date in 2009. Less than a year later she introduced us both to Boston Terriers when she got Willa. Once Willa came into our lives — well. We got a little obsessed. Which led to adopting Bocephus, a deaf Boston Terrier. Which introduced us to the world of rescue.
One thing leads to another.
So How Did I Start Photographing Dogs?
Once I was deep in rescue, I started to see something that felt familiar.
Photographing a foster dog to make someone want to adopt them wasn't actually that different from photographing a prom dress to make a teenager want to buy it. Both were about making someone see something beautiful. Both were about connection — between a person and a thing they didn't know yet they needed.
I bought a cheap DSLR. I started photographing my foster dogs. Then other people's foster dogs. Then the dogs started getting adopted faster.
And Then We Bought a Farm
We wanted space. We wanted to rescue more dogs and get out of the suburbs. We moved to eleven acres in Rutledge, Georgia — renovated an 1840s farmhouse, built a 40x60 foot shelter with seventeen kennels, and started Rescue Ranch.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I stopped feeling compelled to sell prom dresses and started feeling compelled to do this.
To photograph dogs the way I'd learned to photograph everything else — with intention, with craft, with the goal of making someone see something they already loved as something even more beautiful than they'd realized.
That's still the goal. It has always been the goal.
It just took thirteen-year-old me selling prom dresses in Georgia to figure out how to get here.
→ Read next: