Lesson Info
13. Creating a Book
Lessons
Class Introduction
05:49 2Prepping for Puppy Photo Shoot
04:28 3Cavalier: Puppy Awake in Basket
07:27 4Cavalier: Puppy on Floor Laying on Muslin
06:24 5Cavalier: Puppy in Posing Bag
04:15 6Cavalier: Puppy in Wood Bowl
05:16 7Cavalier: Two Puppies on Posing Bag
08:50 8Cavalier: Puppy in Purple Fabric
05:16Lesson Info
Creating a Book
When you're photographing puppies like that in your studio you can see the chaos you can see how much fun it is and it, like it blows our mind, doesn't it? And on so many occasions we've said to each other how lucky are we? Like that we actually get to do this, we get to choose to do this. So it's been a pretty spectacular experience creating you know, such a wonderful gallery of photos and being able to show you how we do it here in the studio and have lots of little furry animals crawling around and biting each other and messing up and all of that kind of stuff that chaos is the best part about it. And yeah there's nothing we actually love doing more at the moment, which is lots of fun. Yeah lots of fun. But this is our incredible walk. And this is what we've, you know, we've created all of those photographs that we have been working on for the past sort of eight months. This is what it's been going towards and to share it with you is actually pretty amazing. Yes, so I'm so exc...
ited to show you. So this is the album that we've created. So yeah, we're so grateful for Graphing Studios for producing these beautiful albums. They've designed it with a hard cover acrylic front which has a bit of a metallic shine to it and yeah so I wanted to keep the design very simple. We got inspiration through fine art books and you know, just different photographers that we were inspired by and the layout we wanted to keep really nice and simple and just incorporate some beautiful quotes that refer to the photographs. So I'm just gonna flip through and just show you inside the book. Yeah so a lot of full page spreads, just so yeah the photographs stand out and then what I did is I just went through and I selected a handful of images that would go beautifully as a double spread page. That shoot was fun. That was. There were nine puppies in this litter but we didn't get all of them in the frame so we had to shoot each one individually for safety as well. Yes. Which was... Lots of fun. Yeah yeah. So these are just a few examples of some of the photos that we've taken, and they just look so beautiful laid out in these double spreads. Incorporating some of the logos down here. Oh logos, sorry, I mean poems and quotes. What our aim was to try and create something that was, you know, a little different, a little unique and on the front cover, the beautiful boxer that's on there is my boy Ali, he's now four years old so when I started taking his photos four years ago, I don't know, I think I took a million photos every day for the first three weeks when we finally got to bring him home. And he truly is my baby and you know so many people are in that same situation, they just love their dogs so much and they are their fur babies. And this is what inspired us to create this book which yeah to see it in print like this and how Graphing Studios have actually printed it is absolutely incredible for us. Like the quality is incredible. What we're sort of working towards next is having it published, which is a big thing. We really want to see this in book stores, we want other people to enjoy you know looking through the photographs and when we first started it we didn't think it would be this big but now we're working on book proposals and trying to get a publisher on board which is what we're most excited about at the moment. So in terms of creating a book proposal, what I did was I actually came to Creative Live and I looked up how to create a book proposal and sure enough Sally McGraw has a class called How to Write a Killer Book Proposal and it was the best lesson I could have taken. So I went through that process of writing that proposal, we have submitted it to a few publishers, so fingers crossed. So the reason that Jade and I worked together on this project is because Jade has, you know, a background in graphic design and I don't there's no way I could have designed this book as beautifully as Jade and it would have taken me probably 12 months just in Photoshop alone to create something like this. So you were a graphic designer for how long? I was a graphic designer for four years. I studied graphic design and I worked in a graphic design studio and then yeah I freelanced out on my own for a little while and yeah, then I became a photographer. But yeah so I love designing. I still love designing books and albums for my clients as well so, yeah. It's been lots of fun. Yeah it's been so much fun. But the importance of teaming up with somebody else to do a mammoth task like this is huge because there's no way I would have had the time or the energy to put into a project like this on my own and have it created in sort of eight months time. So Jade also was responsible for sourcing all of the puppies and my god. You must have sent out a million emails. I did, I emailed so many people and I mean not everyone got back to me because of, you know, the vaccinations they like to have their puppies vaccinated before they leave the house but yeah we were lucky to have about 12 breeders, yeah decide to have their photo, their puppies photographed. And yeah it was great so. Yeah absolutely. And we've also got a couple of puppies in there that didn't come from breeders, they came from you know, their new homes and their new mummies and daddies. So that was really exciting as well. So there's a few different age groups in there but primarily we focused on four week old puppies. And you know we did have to go through a lot of you know, sort of different connections to find the right breeders that would work with us as well because like Jade said, you know those vaccinations and people being really careful of the sterilization of the space that they bring those puppies to. But yeah, we've had so much fun working on this project together, it's been really nourishing. It's given us a new lease on life I suppose as an artist. We became, you know, very focused in our own businesses and then we started to photograph these puppies and I think second shoot in we didn't want to photograph a human again. (laughing) we fell in love with puppies and have just had so much fun throughout this entire project. But yeah, and being able to transition you know, my newborn photography skills over into creating this has been huge. So everything that I do in my studio when I'm photographing human newborns I've been able to transition over into photographing puppies. You know I use the same techniques when it comes to lighting, how I use that light, how I direct it. I also have the same safety concerns with a human newborn and a little tiny furry one as well you know in terms of not putting them into dangerous positions or you know, dangerous heights and things like that, so we're always handling them the same way we'd handle our own baby. And yeah when it comes to you know, how I pose, how I style, all of those techniques as a newborn photographer are just carried straight over into photographing puppies. And when it comes to the technical aspects in terms of how I capture them and composition and all of that, it's exactly the same. It is really just like photographing a human newborn when you've got a little baby puppy curled up on your posing bag. And when you know we started to do this I just, I felt so much more inspired about creating these completely different unique setups every time we had a litter of puppies in the studio. Yeah and we also had, kept in mind too that we were capturing these photos for a book so we kept in mind like to keep some negative space there so we can put quotes and poems and stuff in there as well. Kept in mind that we may be shooting for a double spread as well so, yeah. Yeah, when we decided to make this book we created a bit of a plan and it went for, I mean it actually was, we were going to do it over a 12 month period and we've done it in eight and it's been really amazing the response that we had from so many breeders to come in was incredible. Obviously though, we're only available X amount of days during the week to shoot those puppies. So creating that plan and being able to schedule in with our own businesses has been really important as well. But we mapped out a timeframe and then we started to work on you know, how long each session would obviously take, how many photos we'd roughly need to fill a book of this size and then we shot like Jade said specifically for it. And we created beautiful unique setups with every single you know, shoot that we did. So being able to sort of bring everything across that I've been you know doing in my newborn photography studio for 14 years and transition all of those skills into making this beautiful book, Jade and I have just had so much fun and we know that you're gonna have fun creating something for you as well. Because it's really important to have these personal projects. Even if you don't go out and make a book that you want to see on shelves you know in a book store. Make it for yourself, make it for friends, family, make it to have it on your website or even a coffee table book you know to have in your studio for your clients to sort of view and see. But it is very very you know time consuming. So you've got to make that plan and you know you've got to invest in it as well. So it's really important that you, you know you map that out and you create a plan that you can actually work to and achieve.
Ratings and Reviews
Paula Ayers
I am not a photographer. I do compositing using Photoshop and was interested in seeing how they set up and pose such lively subjects. Such care was taken with the puppies and I learned a lot about getting just the right poses using different setups like muslin, bowls, etc. For compositing, it's important to know what you are looking for in order to bring images together correctly. This course, besides being fun to watch, has helped me, even if my images don't wiggle as much as these puppies.
user-2f5d81
I loved everything about this class!! It was so obvious by the handling and the way you interacted with the puppies how much care and thought goes into the artwork you created. I'm so excited to put all of your ideas into my own creativity. Thank you for providing me with the inspiration to move forward with pet photography!