Odin and Tilly are Border Collies, and if you know anything about Border Collies you already know what that means for a photography Session. They’re smart, fast, and completely ball obsessed. A ball is currency. It’s how you get their attention, how you get them to look, how you get them to do anything at all.
Robyn found me through someone in her circle who had a portrait hanging in their home – Sarge, a German Shepherd I photographed at Parliament House, peeking around one of the pillars with direct eye contact and a soft, relaxed expression, the warm sandstone of the building complementing his black and tan coat perfectly. She said every time they visited, that photo stopped them. The detail in his face, the way the light brought out his colouring, the fact that he looked like he was staring straight at you. That’s what she wanted for Odin and Tilly. Not a specific pose or a checklist of images, just that same level of connection and detail – the light and environment working together to bring out everything that makes them who they are.
She booked the Session as a Christmas gift for her husband, and I offered to send her a physical gift certificate so he’d have something to unwrap on Christmas Day rather than just being told about it. By the time we met for their Session in late January, he’d known about it for almost a month.
During our planning conversation, Robyn had described wanting somewhere natural, somewhere that felt like the places they actually walked with the dogs. When I showed her environment samples she zeroed in immediately on that golden sunrise feeling – the kind of warm, low light that sits across open grassy meadows in the early morning. When she saw a photo of Bones in exactly that kind of setting, she said “yep, that’s it”. So I told her the location, explained we’d need to be there at sunrise to get that light, and we locked it in.
We met on a Friday morning at the end of January in Warrandyte, down in the meadow as the sun was coming up. There was a short wait for the light to rise enough to give us what we were after, but once it did, Odin and Tilly moved through that space with the kind of energy that makes Border Collies so much fun to photograph. From the meadow we headed down closer to the river, where the fog was still sitting low over the water and that golden glow was coming up and over the trees behind it. That’s where I got a portrait of the two of them together that I still dream about recreating over and over – the fog as a backdrop, the light warm and soft, both dogs in the same image.
From there we made our way up to the top of the hill for the last of the sunrise light, and that’s where the Session really came together. Odin and Tilly laying on the ground with the gum trees behind them, the sunlight filtering through the canopy and catching the edges of their fur. They’re fluffy dogs, and that rim light just wrapped around them. By that point they were tired enough to be completely relaxed, happy to stay there, soft and settled in a way that only comes at the end of a good morning.
A funny memory for me early in the Session was when Tilly, being Tilly, had fully committed to the ball as her primary objective in life. During the running sequences I asked Robyn to throw it straight at me – “aim to hit me” I said, “you won’t get in trouble”. There’s a frame where Tilly has realised mid-sprint that she’s about to collide with me and has skidded to a stop, wide-eyed and apologetic. Two frames later, the ball connects with my lens.
I just laughed. That’s exactly why I have a lens protector — if something hits it, licks it, or scratches it, it’s just a cheaper piece of glass I can replace rather than my actual lens. See below for those moments (unfortunately my camera lost focus otherwise this would’ve been an epic photo).
As we were walking back to the cars, Robyn told me “I trusted that the photos would be amazing, I’ve seen Sarge’s photo – its amazing! But I hadn’t realised how fun the Session itself was going to be!” We’d actually spent a good amount of our time laughing, that’s how much fun it was.
That’s the part that’s easy to overlook until you’re in it.
After seeing all the photos, Robyn and her husband had a hard time picking the photos they wanted to purchase as framed artwork. But knew they wanted individual portraits of the two of them to display in their living room. After much consideration, and checking how my editing works – they landed on their picks for framed artwork and moved on to picking their digital inclusions!
Once the final framed images arrived, they were immediately hung on the walls where Robyn then sent me a beautiful message with a photo thanking me for them. At this point I saw one tiny little detail that they’d missed – but I’d planned for when taking their portraits and I asked if I could offer a piece of advice.
When Robyn said yes, I suggested swapping them so that Odin and Tilly would be facing towards each other, making them feel more like a set and helping lead the eyes from one images through the other, and back again. After they made that one small tweak, Robyn confirmed they looked much better and she was surprised such a small change made such a large difference, but she also appreciated that I’d thought of that when taking the photos.
The session had turned out exactly as she’d hoped. And the photos on her wall – with her husband having known since Christmas morning that this was coming; were exactly where they were always meant to end up.
