A Princess and Her Dog | Lifestyle Photography | Grosse Pointe

I couldn’t be more thrilled today! About two weeks ago, this sweet image that I snapped of our daughter and our Alaskan Malamute – both in “costume” was discovered by Light Inspired  “A forum community built to inspire, support & empower women in their photography journey.” They found my image posted on my Google+ wall and shared it to their own Google+ wall. Now, I’ve been smitten with this adorable image since I first took it, but I’m also quite biased about how cute the subjects are… so when I received such a wonderful compliment and a public share to a community of photographers, well, let’s just say that I was pretty giddy!

Today I have even bigger cause to be even more giddy! Today, Light Inspired has posted my image to their Facebook page as their weekly “Caption This” image! If you think you have a winning caption, please head over there and share it with the community! (Light Inspired on Facebook) While you are over there, be sure to give them some “like” love and click the little “thumbs up” button for their page. Much appreciated!

Since this image is getting some public attention, I wanted to, not only blog about it, but to also share the other sweet images from that little session. So. How did this happen? Well I decided to start a personal project where I captured some images of my quirky little girl’s spunky attitude and silly behavior. I wanted to start a series of photos other wearing princess attire and doing the things that she does every day. Some of these activities are quite “normal” for a toddler and just made all the more cute, adorable and quirky by the extra added attire. Some of the activities are not so normal, in that I managed to capture a “one time only” event.

This little series with our dog, Akiak (we call him “fluffy” a lot because, well, he’s quite large and VERY fluffy!) was quite a silly happening that I stumbled upon. While Olivia was wearing her princess dress, she was playing with her doll house in her room. I ran downstairs to grab my camera and came back to her trying to dress the dog up. Since he is too big for her dresses, I opted to offer her a hair bow for him. This was an agreeable compromise. He seemed indifferent. I saw the “gold mine” in what was unfurling before me, for photography purposes. I moved them both to the landing on the stairs and photographed them as they interacted there so that I could have a more clean backdrop for the images. I bribed Akiak with dog treats so that he didn’t lumber off to go carry on sleeping in a corner somewhere else. I may or may not have also bribed the toddler, with the extremely short attention span, to carry on playing with Akiak… for a few pieces of chocolate. Shame, shame. I know. There was a large guilt cloud raining shame down upon me. …until I saw the resulting images on my computer monitor. Priceless. I made good on my bribes. For both the dog and the toddler. And I scored these great images that I will forever cherish.

Again, I may be biased, but if you love these images as much as I do, please leave me a comment below telling me so! Thanks!