A few years ago, Annie thought it'd be fun to do yearbook-style posed photos of dogs graduating from classes at School For The Dogs.  She mentioned the idea to a few photographers and they all gave her blank stares. Then, she was scrolling through Instagram and she found a photographer whose entire feed was... posed, yearbook-style photos of dogs. Annie got in touch with the person behind the account: Andrea Castanon. Andrea was working as a professional photo retoucher and during her downtime was making these hilarious photoshopped portraits of her friends' dogs for fun, and to raise money for rescue organizations.  Annie invited her to hold some shoots at School For The Dogs. Two years later, Andrea -- whose company, BowieShoots, is named for her own rescue dog -- has shot hundreds of dogs (and even some other types of pets as well) all over the country, delighting their owners with her backgrounds and knack for catching doggie smiles. While she has had to stop shooting dogs in person during the COVID-19 crisis, she tells Annie about the creative way she has both been able to continue her business and help adoptable dogs find homes during quarantine. 

BowieShoots

Bowie Shoots Instagram

Social Tees Animal Rescue

Train Your Dog Without Pain, Using Your Brain" Sticker

School For The Dogs

Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hey everyone. I am here today with a wonderful photographer whose name is Andrea Castanon. You might know her by her business's name. Her business is called Bowie Shoots. Bowie is the name of her rescue dog. Andrea, it is so good to see you.

Andrea:

You too. Didn't know the next time would be virtual.

Annie:

I know, I know. So I am so excited to be talking to you. Well I, Andrea, I would really love to talk to you about how you got into doing what you do. And then I want to talk about how you're working currently, which I think is really interesting. But...

Andrea:

Yeah, all involved.

Annie:

It's so, it's so cool. It's so cool. You’re a hero to me. But  I want to maybe just describe how you came into my life or how you came to School from the Dogs from my perspective. So for years we have had this, kind of like, school theme to School for the Dogs, kind of,  playful sort of retro, like decorations and just a vibe and theme of, like, old school way to put it. Like if you have, I'm trying to think of like how I would describe it to someone who doesn't know about us or hasn't been to our studio, like just old chalkboards but also photos that are, kind of like, a retro throwback to school days, as you know, adults today might've experienced school in like a fun, playful way.

And so years and years ago,  I think, even before we opened up our first storefront location, we got a big like laser photo background made and we started having our graduates pose in front of this laser background photo, like kind of, something like from the nineties. And we were always just like doing it with our cell phones and it was never like it was particularly literally thought out. But it was kind of like just a fun, silly thing that we did. And I kept thinking like, we should go farther with this. It would be cool to, like, actually have more sort of styled like school photo kind of photos that we could take of graduates or puppies or whatever just to kind of go with this  theme. And I couldn't really figure out like, just like how to make that happen...

Full Transcript at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dogtraining.substack.com