Fido, say ‘cheese’

Is your pet a genuine family member? Looking for a way to memorialize your pet? A pet photograph may be the answer.

Brice Logan, owner of Evergreen Reptiles, offers a pet photography service. He said many pet owners want to remember their pet the way it was at its healthiest.

“We’ve actually had two or three people whose animal has passed away and they’ve come to us for reprints of a photo taken earlier,” he said. “Others come to us and say they’ve had their pet for 10 years and they are afraid something might happen to it, so they want a photo to remember.”

Logan first experimented with pet photography for his reptile breeding business, Evergreen Reptiles, a few years ago. “I started taking pictures of geckos and snakes and stuff like that,” he said. “Those animals won’t sit still for you.”

Suddenly, he found himself shooting about 100 photos a month and gaining lots of experience. Today, he’s been at professional pet photography about a year.

“For my first time, I actually stepped in during an emergency at a pet store in town,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Hey, I can do that,’” he said. “I already had all the equipment.”

In the near future, Logan is expanding his on-location pet photography business to include an in-house studio with his fiancé, Megen Hall. Between both of them, they own seven pets – five cats, a dog and a snake.

Hall does most of the photography now. Logan said, “I was the main photographer until I fell last winter and slipped on the ice and I couldn’t get off the ground. Then Megen took over.”

“Brice is just so great with the computer. He’s fast,” Hall said. “It just made sense.”

“I was the animal buff first and the photography was a necessary thing for me in business,” said Logan. “But for Megen, photography came first.”

The pet photography business, they say, is very portable. “I have a laptop, so people can view their photos right away,” Logan said. “The turnaround time is only about a week.”

Both Logan and Hall agree that there is an art to taking photos of people’s pets.

“All the pictures that we have make the dog look like it was a perfect angel, but really it wasn’t sitting still,” said Logan. “It’s especially challenging with cats and exotics. They don’t know how to sit or ‘look over here.’”

And then there are those with wings.

“Birds are hard too,” he added. “They have so many different head expressions it’s hard to get what the owners want. Some birds have more color under their wings or on their backs or tails.”

Hall said one of their best tricks to get animals to pay attention involves squeaky toys. “Those are really fun,” she said.

“Usually the key for any animal is to make a sound they’ve never heard before,” said Logan. “The toys make unusual noises. One makes gorilla sounds and one makes frog sounds.

Speaking of frogs, Logan said the most unusual animal they’ve photographed so far is a Cuban Tree Frog. “This guy waited in line for quite a while to get his frog’s picture taken. The frog was actually really easy. I just put him on the background that was vinyl and he stuck. Then I took the picture.”

Logan isn’t interested in focusing on human photography. “People always think it must be difficult to take pictures of animals but actually it’s harder to take pictures of kids or even the adult pet owner,” he said. “A lot of times, the person will pay so much attention to the animal that they aren’t looking at the camera. Instead, they’ll be making a funny face.”