My "Why?" - The Story Behind Legacy Dog Portraits
Since the day I was born here in Atlanta, my family has always had dogs around. We've had several Jack Russell Terriers through the years. I still remember when my mom surprised me at the bus stop with our new JRT Sport after kindergarten one afternoon. He was super athletic and loved tennis balls more than anything. When we took him to Lake Oconee, he used to love to jump in the lake off the dock to fetch tennis balls. My parents had to put him down while I was a senior at Virginia Tech in 2016. In 16 years, we never got one professional portrait taken of him sadly.
A bad photo of me and our new puppy Sport circa 2000
Shortly after we got Sport, his half-sister Gidget was introduced into our family. She was not as athletic as Sport, but loved to cuddle and go on long walks around the neighborhood. She passed in 2017, and just like Sport, we never got any professional portraits taken of her either.
A bad photo of me and Gidget circa 2008.
After Gidget passed, my mom found another beautiful JRT named Daisy in 2017. As the story goes, she was apparently too hyper for the older couple that had originally adopted her as a puppy. Although I was now living on my own at the time, I would frequently see her when I went to visit my family. I was heavily into using Snapchat at the time, so I began taking lots of photos and videos of her to post on my Snapchat Stories and frequently saving them to my Snapchat Memories for safe keeping.
A bad Snapchat photo I took of our new puppy, "Daisy." in 2017. Little did I know this would be the first of many!
Shortly after Daisy was introduced, in came her half-brother Beamer in 2018. Beamer was just a puppy when we got him, and he would shadow Daisy around the house and while she played in the yard. I continued my trend of photographing him and Daisy to share on my Snapchat stories from 2018 until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
A bad Snapchat photo I took of our new puppy, "Beamer." in 2018.
When the pandemic hit in 2020 and we were sent to work from home, I moved back in with my parents and their dogs to quarantine with them for a few months. During this time, my bond with Beamer and Daisy grew stronger, and I was taking Snapchat photos and videos of each of them almost daily. Eventually, we would get called back into the office and things would revert to normal, but I could not stop taking photos and videos of Beamer and Daisy every time I would come to visit them.
How was I supposed to work like this!?
When my stimulus check hit, I decided to invest it by getting my first camera, a Canon 90D. I was running a YouTube guitar channel at the time, so my main motivation for getting it was to improve my video quality while also freeing up storage space on my phone. I knew my camera was capable of taking great photos, but I knew nothing about photography at the time, so I was not. I would sometimes mess around and take a photo or two of Beamer and Daisy in "Automatic" mode just to see how it looked, but I also didn't have any editing software at time time or extra money to invest in it, so I continued just snapping away on my phone camera for Snapchat.
An "Automatic" mode photo of Daisy (top) taken 11/28/2020 and Beamer (bottom) taken 12/24/2020. Both of these sat untouched in my photos app for a long time since I did not have the editing software or expertise to edit them properly at the time.
Paddleboarding was our preferred pack activity
I continued to dedicate every minute of time outside of work to run my YouTube channel which really began taking off after 2020. Since Beamer and Daisy were still very young and since I still did not have photo editing software, I continued taking terrible-quality photos and videos of them every time I would see them (see carousel above). At one point, I even created a YouTube channel just to share my videos of them together and to begin to catalog them all in one place.
One of the first YouTube videos I made during quarantine with a cameo from Beamer.
Daisy loved splashes, waves, bubbles, water, and fish. If there was ever any fun splishing and splashing going on, she would routinely escape the electric fence to participate. She loved swimming and biting bubbles in the water more than anything.
Beamer's favorite chillout spot in the summertime
On Wednesday, August 10, 2022, we had some family visiting us from out of town. I had already used all my PTO being sick with COVID-19, so I was stuck in the office until Friday. That Friday afternoon, I arrived to the lake to find out that Daisy had drowned on that Wednesday apparently in a freak accident. It was so sudden and unexpected that it really shook our whole family to the core. I remember how disappointed I was when I realized that my only half-decent in-focus photo of her (above) cropped out much of her whiskers, ears, and hair. This was the day I stopped using Snapchat and started taking photography a lot more seriously.
Me at my old call center job where I was stuck on that fateful day in 2022
In late 2022, I quit Snapchat and YouTube and began to focus my creative energy solely on capturing images with my camera and teaching myself how to edit. I never missed an opportunity to photograph Beamer out in the yard or in the lake. Eventually, my mom would adopt a Weimaraner rescue named Blu (not to replace Daisy, but to give Beamer a friend) . My best friend is a dog trainer, and he still allows me to photograph many of his dogs.
Beamer stands no chance against Blu in the yard.
For Black Friday 2025, I decided to invest in my first photo studio equipment - a 300W strobe and a 34" soft box. I took this to the lake with me for Christmas, and ended up taking two really nice shots of Beamer and Blu up on the bed with a grey backdrop. The quality was so great that I had to get each of them printed. I ended up getting one paper print framed of Beamer and a small canvas print of Blu. To my surprise, both pieces turned out great and I treasure each of them to this day. I still really wish I had one of Daisy, though.
Finally! My first "decent" portraits of Beamer and Blu. I was so happy with them that I would end up ordering prints for these a couple months later. For full-size images, check out my Portfolio page.
These images still weren't good enough for me, so I had to order prints. During this process, I learned how to properly calibrate my computer monitor so that the colors I was seeing on my screen were consistent with the colors on the print shop's screen. After one minor color adjustment, the revised prints turned out great!
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