Tank the tank.

oh how i love a bulldog puppy! (photos taken in and around the awesome shirlington dog park.)

Breathtaking baby giraffe.

Everyone has someone they want to be when they grow up and I think that person for me is Sharon Montrose. She's an animal photographer based out of LA and her work is beautiful and stylized and full of wonderful animal expressions and moments, with some very exotic animals. In this video she photographs a precious 3-month-old giraffe and talks about how photographing animals helped her to reclaim her love for photography.

She expresses a lot of how I feel about my work with Houndstooth. I've also taken pictures since I was 15, and have gone through so many phases with my work. It's a true passion for me because I have struggled with it. Sometimes when I am shooting, I am so completely in the moment and feel unbelievably powerful, and then other times I've been so frustrated that I can't find the inspiration to capture something the way I know it can be captured.

I had also resigned myself just to have photography as a hobby, but then my life took a shift and and Lara and I decided to start Houndstooth. Although I knew I loved animals and I loved photography, I was unprepared for how much I was going to love photographing animals. In our sessions, these animals exude so much postivity which makes me happy and makes the owners happy. The photographs always show me a bit more than I can see with my own eye about how uniqueness and beauty of each animal.

Now it's almost been a year since Lara moved back to the midwest and I've been running Houndstooth on my own. So many of the administrative structures have already been established, so I am much freer to just enjoy the photo shoots and the work that results. I feel lucky that I have such fun work and I know that this feeling will keep bringing Houndstooth new opportunities...maybe even opportunities that involve a baby giraffe.