Monthly Archives: February 2008

Click on the title of the blog post to view the entire entry.


Does Fergie look disgruntled?

Is it the lip?

For more funny dog photos go here.

CityDog Magazine Art Gallery Show

This morning I joined Brandie Ahlgren (CityDog Magazine editor extraordinaire), Bev Sparks, and Emily Rieman for a tour of the space where our art show will be held next week.

I am getting really excited. The space is going to take a little bit of work (it’s the old Fenix Underground space), but I can’t wait to see it done- it’s going to be awesome. No, beyond awesome- spectacular! We just need to do a little bit of cleaning, throw up some white Christmas lights, mix in some colorful art and beautiful photography and we’ll have ourselves a show.

IMHO this will be a groundbreaking event- featuring 8 of some of the best Seattle dog photographers and artists under one roof at the same time, in a neighborhood renowned for its (non-dog) fine art. The only other place I can think of that this has taken place is at the Dogs Gallery in California. Hopefully this is just the beginning! (Now if we could just get the Chelsea folks to follow in our lead…)

And now the official blurb:

***************************************************************************

What: Join CityDog Magazine and the Pioneer Square Community Association for the first-ever dog friendly art walk as part of the First Thursday Art Walk in Pioneer Square.

Be sure to check out the CityDog-hosted, one-night-only art exhibit showcasing the fabulous works of some of Seattle’s finest dog photographers and artists all in one location!

When: Thursday March 6, 2008, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Where: Seattle’s Pioneer Square,
109 S. Washington Street (at the old Fenix in Occidental Square)

Why:

Featured photographers include:

Featured artists include:

This dog friendly event is one-night-only, so don’t miss this chance to mingle with fellow dog lovers and visit with the photographers and artists who will be on hand to discuss and share their wonderful works of fine art and photography with you. Also, bring your wallet! Many of the artists will have smaller pieces for sale- the perfect take-home items.

And be sure to bring your (friendly) dogs- this event is pet-friendly!

*********************************************************************************

Click here to add yourself to Cowbelly’s Evite for the event

Yipee! Dogs and photography and art, oh my!!

Cowbelly Goes Global!

I am very excited to announce that as of today I am officially signed on with my first (and only) Photographer’s Representative: Auscape International

Auscape International promotes themselves as being:

“among the world’s foremost sources of rights-managed natural history photography, that has developed a worldwide reputation as a premiere library specializing in wildlife and landscapes (and now domestic animals), working with 200 of some of the most highly respected nature photographers in the world.”

For those who are scratching their heads as to what this means to me, a photographer’s representative acts somewhat like an actor’s or writer’s rep, only works for photographers instead. A photo rep is a person with established contacts in the industry with art directors, ad agencies, magazines, publishers, stock agencies and more.

They do the dirty work to get a photographer’s images in front of the people who are interested in using them. They are great for photographers like me who are too busy running their businesses and don’t want to take on the daunting task of creating their own stock library and doing all of the costly promotions a small agency requires to find buyers for their images. And who also want their images to be of more benefit to them than they currently are sitting on their hard drives.

Auscape supplies images to stock agencies the world over, many of which are in Europe, so the potential for exposure is huge.

“How did this happen?” you ask?

I received an email from one of the directors of Auscape the day before my holiday vacation was over in early January, saying:

“I have been perusing your website and have found your work to be of wonderful quality and of great interest to us.

To this end we would ask if you are represented in Australia or any other countries worldwide. We have sub-agents in 68 countries and we would like to discuss the possibility of Auscape being your representative. Once again congratulations on your work and we look forward to your reply.”

Can you believe it? I was thrilled! Thrilled. :-)

BUT not before checking them out. I have been contacted by a couple of agencies in the past and didn’t feel they were the right fit for me or I had issues with their contract so turned them down. (There are a lot of not-so-great agencies out there).

Working with Auscape (thus far) has been a great (and relatively easy) process, if you don’t count the time it took me last weekend to sort through my images, re-size and rename them and create metadata descriptions for each image. I started at something like 1072 images, then narrowed it down to about 730, then 400, then finally 340. (Their minimum submission requirement is 200 images). I am so thankful that I have worked hard on my photography the last year so I didn’t need to do extensive photoshop processing on each image. Had that been the case it would have taken me 3 weeks instead of 3 days. I have a ways to go with photography yet but this gives me even more incentive to get the shots right ‘in camera’. It will make it a lot easier to ’supply on demand’.

Today I am shipping off a DVD with approximately 340 images, all perfectly sized and renamed and looking purty.

What is really exciting (as if this isn’t exciting enough), is that the images will be going on a DVD that will be played at a major pet industry trade show in New Zealand in early March.

Whoopee!!

Now that I have finished this labor-intensive process I can get back to my regular work and (hopefully) start posting more often.

Oh and BTW, this was to be my big project announcement for March, but I beat myself to my own deadline!

Hope everyone is having a fantastic day! It’s SUNNY in Seattle! :-)

From the archives

I have spent the weekend going through my image archives for one of my projects (to be announced on Tuesday). This has been a time-consuming process as there are literally thousands of dog and cat images on my hard drive (don’t even get me started on the ones on discs).

I pulled a few never-before seen shots to share here. There is no rhyme or reason to them; they just happened to be the ones I saw first. All of these are from the Canon EOS 5D with the Canon 20mm prime lens.

Hope everyone had a terrific weekend!

Vegas and Emma (l-r)

Karma

Kate & Spencer (l-r)

Fergie and her crazy face. Notice the dilated pupils?

Robbie

Seamus

Kengo (Karma’s big brother)

Scout

Kate

Monty

Roxie

Kate

Oliver

Sampson 1

Sampson 2

Sampson 3

Katie

Ramon and Beau (l-r)

Oscar

Fergie

Willy