Welcome to my 52 week Photo Project! In an effort to continue to improve as a photographer, this year I joined a group called the Beautiful Beasties Network. The Beautiful Beasties Network is an online community of pet photographers, and one of the main reasons I joined was to participate in the 52 on Friday Project. Every week a different pet photographer from across the globe chooses a theme, which each photographer participating interprets in their own way. We all post our images to our blogs at the same time and link up in a “Blog Ring” which you can follow along by clicking the link below my images. This week’s theme is Style. We were asked to present images that define our own photographic style, or showcase our pet’s style. This week I had a session with Luckey the Flat Coated Retriever and used him for this week’s theme.

I actually did a style exercise at my recent photography workshop, Unleashed, which you can read about here. Everyone in the workshop was given a list of words to describe a photographic style, and then we “assigned” the words to each other’s work. At the end of the exercise, we tallied up the number of times we were assigned a certain word, and that helped us to define our style. The words I was assigned most often were Classic, Clean, Honest, Joyous, Loving, and Natural. My secondary words were Beautiful, Fresh and Timeless.  At first I was a little surprised by the words people thought described my work.  After spending some time thinking about it and looking at my images, I have to agree.  Some words I may like more than others, but all of them are “my words.”  I want to evoke an emotion, and capture the love and joy your family gives you in a way that is Clean and Natural looking.

Also, Jaime of Cowbelly Photography wrote this great article about style you can read here. When reading Jaime’s article, I would say I am a little Traditional, a little Fine Art, and a little Modern. Sounds a little bit all over the place, but looking back at my style words from the workshop, those categories do fit.  Maybe my style is in a transition period…

Here are a few of Luckey the Flat Coated Retriever that I think are true to my style, what ever it may be.  I hope these images give you an idea of what a fun loving dog he is, and I hope these give you the feeling of warmth and summer.

Follow the blog ring around to see more Pet Photography, next is Stacy Gammon, Dog Photographer.