PawPrintsLife Blog
PawPrintsLife Blog
What Sets PawPrintsLife Photography Apart? by Virgil Sweeden

From our photos, handlers often say, “Oh, that’s why he ran that way!” or “Now I see what I’ve been doing!”
To put it another way, a lot of photographers stand or sit stationary at one point beside the ring, and they photograph just one obstacle during an entire class. So you might get two or three choices of shots showing your dog at the tire jump. That’s it. I do things differently. I take as many shots of different obstacles as I can—and everything in between. For many runs, I get just about everything from the start-line stay to the celebration at the end.
2.I take more photos in a weekend than most people take in a lifetime. On a typical agility or obedience weekend, I take between 5,000 and 20,000 pictures.

In this way, people can see dozens of full-sized and even enlarged pictures on the screen before they buy them—not just a handful of reduced-quality images on a website.
And for those who can’t stop by our booth or who want to see more images later, we offer the online second-chance galleries. See the Agility and Obed pages to check those out.

After each event, we spend time in the studio doing painstaking color correction, balancing, and cropping—all by hand.
No other photographer that I know of provides that level of service. Most of them do no cropping at all, or they use only “machine” cropping. By comparison, we talk to customers to find out exactly what they’d like cropped in the images they select, and we often do cropping on the spot so they can see the result immediately.
4. We focus on the photography. I’m a photographer, and that’s what I do best. We don’t offer shirts or flags or mugs. Instead, we provide the best images possible.

5. We offer premium photo products. Check out our Photo Products page to see examples of the “seamless” sequences we produce, using sequential images of a dog over a jump, on a teeter, etc. More than one person has looked at one of those shots and said, “How did you get six Dalmatians to do that?”
We also produce lots of composites of still photos, often with text. And we do “artistic” prints that look like various types of paintings and posters.

As needed, we can retouch the photos to remove leads and people. In that way, we can produce photos of five or six dogs that seem to be standing perfectly together without a leash in sigh. Check out more examples on the Portraits page.
7. We work on location at people’s homes or at other sites to capture their dogs (and other pets!) in the settings where they’re the most comfortable. For a typical portrait session, I take between 15 and 100 shots. The owner or handler reviews them almost immediately on the computer and makes selections.
8.We use all professional-grade equipment and supplies. From the $5,000-plus Nikon D3s camera to the Epson professional photo printer that fills the top of a desk, I use the best equipment I can buy. I also use archival inks and paper. And I use Adobe Lightroom software, the professional standard for image processing. As needed for complex retouching, I also use Adobe Photoshop.
9.We guarantee your satisfaction. Because all our production work is done here in our own studio, on our professional equipment, and to PawPrintsLife standards, we offer something that many other photographers can’t:
If you don’t like a print we make for you, we will adjust it exactly as you want it.

We offer a satisfaction guarantee. If you ever don’t like a product you receive from us, tell us. We’l fix it. It’s just that simple.
Rebecca and I work hard to photograph people and their beloved pets. We are grateful for every person who relies on us for their photo memories.
Thanks for trusting us!
Sunday, July 31, 2011