Evolution of Puppy Photos

It was brought to my attention this week that out puppy photos have really changed over the years. Every week I used to post to this blog with my favorite photos, bloopers and fun facts. Then life happened and the weekly blog posts stopped happening.

I am not going to promise to do blog posts every week again, but I would like to start posting more often.

Colorado Puppy Rescue has given me a gift that I want to share. The last 3 years I have immersed myself in learning photography. It was a rough start, but luckily puppies are cute not matter who is behind the lens.

You can see many examples of photos a few years back in the previous blog post. If nothing else scanning through them gave me a real laugh.

We were taking photos outside and this time of year was rough - shooting in the dark was a way of life, and what was in the background was anyone's guess:


I was also learning photo editing software and spent HOURS on getting just the right affect.

Not to shock you but the puppy above was not at the beach.


Again....I know this is really fantastic editing, but this puppy was not looking in through a car window!!!

The photos that we are doing today are simple, but I hope that the love that I pour into it still shines through. The one thing that hasn't changed over the years...........puppies are still adorable.



Thanks,
Christy Hess

You've heard of shark week, but have you heard of Chihuahua Week?

 At CPR we are celebrating chihuahua week by featuring one of our pocket-sized puppies every day. Today, I am honored to introduce you to Puppy #870 our Chi-Weenie Mix Boy.

He's a little boy with a huge heart that just wants to love you all the time.HeI loves to play with his toys and other dogs but he really just wants to snuggle up with you. Will you please adopt him so he can give you puppy kisses and snuggles?

Our boy is about 12 weeks old and about 8 lbs. He can fit in a shoe box, in your lap, in a purse, in your shirt....

Puppy #870 is happy sleeping in his bed (or yours.) 

He likes to chew (he's teething) but pretty much only on his toys. He does love to play with his toys.

               

        He likes to chew on sticks too.

He loves roll around in the grass and hang out in the sunshine. He's also working on perfecting his stink eye.

Our boy is will be available for adoption at our Saturday adoption event at The Hopeful Hound. (www.coloradopuppy.org) or by appointment. Email brook@coloradopuppy.org.

Friday Fix - 6-27-2014 - Professional Photos

I am an amateur photographer who is always looking for new ways to raise funds for Colorado Puppy Rescue and have fun at the same time.

I found a fundraiser for another rescue where a professional photographer was donating all of the money paid for photo sessions to the rescue. I thought I would go check it out. I paid $75 for 1/2 hour session for my dog and myself. There was an option of $120 for an hour for multiple dogs/family members. What I found out after the session is that this photographer is charging a ton of money for the resulting photos and because I was only booked for 1/2 hour my dog didn't really have time to settle down. I bought an adorable pink pearl necklace and I had to ask over and over and over again to be able to put it on. To top it all off, I have to setup another session to "view" the resulting photos at the photographers studio.

I really want to do a photo session for Colorado Puppy Rescue, but would like to schedule hour long sessions (so we can have some fun) and include two digital or printed photos. All photos from the shoot would be available on the website and could be purchased separately. Would you be willing to pay $75 for a photo session with me? Let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me at funds@coloradopuppy.org! If I get enough interest I will work on getting it scheduled in August.

OK - onto other fun things. If you can't already tell, puppy/dog photos are my obsession lately. Everywhere I look I see photo props. One of my friends told me about a Groupon - of course I jumped on it.

Used it in a couple of photos this week and think it is going to be a great photo prop.

If you come across anything that would make a great prop for puppy photos, please let me know! I am constantly in search of capturing the perfect puppy photo. Here is my favorite from this week:

Have a great Friday and I look forward to hearing from you. If you ever want to take a look at all of our puppy photos, they are available along with our alumni and before/after photo albums. Please check them out at http://coloradopuppyrescue.zenfolio.com/

Getting Back in the Swing of Things

By Christy Hess

Sitting here on Mother's day watching it snow and counting my blessings. The one thing that has been nagging at me for months is my lack of posts on this Dog Blog, so starting today that is going to change! 

Let me start by telling you all about the exciting changes for Colorado Puppy Rescue over the last few months. On the top of that list is that we now have our own Adoption Center (The Hopeful Hound)!!!!! Having our own space is amazing! 

The Hopeful Hound is at 16780 E. Iliff Ave, Aurora CO 80013.
This is the Southwest corner of Iliff and Buckley - the corner with Burger King and the Money Tree. We don't have signage yet, so please look for our signs out on the sidewalk in front of our new place. We are right next to the groomer. 

There is still work to be done, but the space is fabulous. Stop by and see us on a Saturday and check out our new digs. Watch for an invitation to our Open House (or Grand Opening) coming soon!

Along with the new space we also have an online sign up sheet. Instead of having to sit in a parking lot at the crack of dawn to get on our list, people can now log on anytime between 12:01am on adoption day until we put out the list 1/2 hour before the event starts and add their name to the sign up sheet. So far it has been wildly successful and there is so much less stress. Just sign up online then show up at the event time! 

I have also managed to scan in all of our earlier adoption photos. So ALL Colorado Puppy Rescue photos are now available in our Zenfolio photo albums! Please check them out: http://coloradopuppyrescue.zenfolio.com/. The high resolution (no watermark) version of each of these photos are available for a $10 donation. You can create a puppy announcement to send to your family and friends with the puppy photo that first caught your eye? Simply search on your puppy number (sometimes you need to have a zero in front of it to make it a 4 digit number). You can also look through the photo albums and see the photos of your puppies siblings!!!!

Here are two easy ways to raise money for Colorado Puppy Rescue:

1. If you make any orders on Amazon, can you please use the link below? When you use smile.amazon.com, Amazon donates .5% of every eligible order made through this site to Colorado Puppy Rescue of Colorado – with no additional charge to you.
   http://smile.amazon.com/ref=smi_ge_rl_rd_gw?_encoding=UTF8&ein=72-1607193. It doesn't sound like much, but it sure does help our rescue.
2. Just start using Yahoo! powered Goodsearch.com as your search engine and they'll donate about a penny to your favorite cause every time you do a search! In addition, do all of your shopping through their online shopping mall, Goodshop.com, where you can shop at more than 2,600 top online retailers and a percentage of your purchases will go to the charity or school of your choice. You pay the same price as you normally would, but a donation goes to your cause! You can also enroll in the Gooddining program. Eat at over 10,000 participating restaurants nationwide and you can earn up to 6% of every dollar spent on the meal as a donation for your charity or school. Here's the web site - http://www.goodsearch.com/. You can also read about Goodsearch in the NY Times, Oprah Magazine, CNN, ABC News and the Wall Street Journal.

As always, I would also like to share a couple of photos from the last few weeks. Hope you enjoy:

OMG - Colorado Puppy Rescue has a new adoption center?

Just so happy!

It's Puppy Time!!!!!!!!!!!!

Will post some great bloopers next week - Happy Mother's Day everyone.

Dramatic Photos

So I was practicing (Ok playing) with my photo software. The photos that we take and post are to show potential adopters the pup, so we can't do a whole lot of color changing or special effects. But I may have to look into using some of these for some greeting cards.

What do you think?

Original

Original

Original

Original

Original

Original - hard to improve on this one!

Original

Amazing how blurring the background made this dog pop!

Original

This was the crop suggestion - and I think they were right!

Original

Looks like an old fashioned photo!

Original

Ohhhh my impressionist!

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

Friday Fix (8/9/2013) - Help!

By Christy Hess

The last few months we have been busy at Colorado Puppy Rescue (in a great way). Every other week we have a longer/bigger intake that starts later in the evening. This week we found out that we definitely need more than one photographer at an event. I was the bottleneck. But my wrangler hung in there for me and we ended up with some great photos!

48 pups + 630 photos + 3 hours + 3 hours cropping photos for website = 1 late night

We had the Sears Portrait studio for puppies going this week, because as we started pictures, the sky opened up and it started pouring rain. The great thing - the puppies are so darn cute this week that they will have no problem finding homes.

There were some bloopers though - enjoy.

Not looking!

Not looking!

Not Looking - see a pattern here?

Might have overdone it with the props on this one - my fault.

Needed to stretch his legs during the photo shoot

Fetch please!

What's happening over there?

What's happening over there?

Gottal love a shar pei shake

...and the other way.

Work it! The camera loves you!

How's this for a picture for the website.

Looks like the same dog as above - but they were two different dogs, just the same pose.

Watch out, if you don't pose for a picture I am going to make you pose in this bucket

Have a great weekend.