2010 is off to a very very good start for us here at Cowbelly, and we are super excited and enthusiastic for what the year already promises to bring. Unlike many I actually had a good year in 2009 but I expect 2010 to be even better. Hey, reach for the stars, right?! I will soon be kicking into year 7 here for the biz, and from what I hear, 7 is a lucky number.
While I am motivated to get started on my current projects and planning and all kinds of other stuff, I have some new policies and clarification I need to put in place. These things should be self-explanatory, and were written by both Christina and myself, after deciding to improve upon our communications with others. Enjoy. 
Our new 2010 policies:
We DO:
- Accept commercial requests, as long as you can give us some remote idea of what you are needing and what it will be used for.
- Photograph dogs and cats on location. As in, not in a studio. And no, those ‘backdrops’ you see on our website are not fake.
- Happily provide a myriad of advice and assistance to other photographers if you dig just a teensy bit. See the ‘for photographers’ page above. You don’t even need to send us an email for most of your questions, we promise!
- Enjoy receiving marketing emails from our vendors and partners. Just not from the same ones every single day.
- Appreciate and enjoy emails from others speaking of being inspired by us. You are very sweet. (Most of you.)
- Accept donation solicitations from nice animal-related organization representatives by email who seem to respect us and what we do.
- Provide blog links to companies we love, whose products and/or services we stand behind and use ourselves. Which are generally pet-related, as opposed to links about vaccuums, golf drivers or hotel resources for cities we’ve never even been to.
- Reward our great clients with complimentary goodies as much as possible. Not because they ask, but because they don’t, and we love them.
and lastly:
- Love and cherish our marketing partners and colleagues who are nice to us and respect us and value our time.
We do NOT:
- Give our images, files, prints, or art away for free (unless you are a documented 501c organization)
- Grant you permission to use our images on the swedish website stallet.se
- Provide editorial or any other kind of work for ‘image credit’, as the term is insulting to an established professional, and well, we’d at least like to think of ourselves as being one.
- Photograph animals in cute little costumes in a studio set in a basket filled with fake flowers, or fake anything for that matter. We prefer the ‘real’ over the ‘faux’.
- Reply to solicitations for advice that were clearly sent to a group of other pet photographers as well as us. Please make us feel special first. We like to have our egos stroked.
- Do photo shoots, post-processing, and ordering sessions in order to sell our clients a single 4×6 ‘portrait’. We have resources we can send folks to for that. (Yuen Lui).
- Share our price sheet with other pet photographers posing as fake clients (yes, we know the real from the fake!).
- Appreciate and enjoy emails from others speaking of being inspired by us who then go on to extensively plagiarize our website.
- Give arbitrary discounts on products, ‘just because you asked’.
- Accept donation solicitation requests from pushy people who call us by phone, or send us a generic donation letter + procurement form, whose organizations have zero connection to animals. *Especially* if they want to include our gift certificate in an auction package where they are auctioning off a puppy. (Really, people, REALLY?)
- Provide links to businesses with no reciprocation. Thanks for asking though. You can take us off your mailing list now.
- Need any help with SEO. Um, have you done a google search for pet photography recently? I’d be happy to sell you MY knowledge. That’ll be five thousand dollars please.
Lastly:
- We do not photograph dogs you are ‘pretty sure MIGHT’ attack us when we arrive.
(And in case you were wondering, yes, all of the above are based on true-life experiences.)
Happy 2010 Everybody! 
