Earlier in the year I clicked on the 2018 folder of photos of our dogs and was horrified to find nothing in there. I thought I’d accidentally deleted the contents so I went about searching my backup drives for the files. Then it dawned on me … I hadn’t taken a single photo of our dogs since their Christmas photos in 2017! Our house and garden isn’t a nice backdrop and I’ve exhausted every option in it. Our dogs aren’t much fun to photograph on location because I need to enlist a handler for each dog to keep the situation under control should a strange dog run over. So the only thing for it was to book a family holiday at a nice pet friendly house in our favourite location – Jervis Bay.

The first set of photos I took were for Bruno’s birthday. You can see them in this post.

Next up was the boys on the nice staircase.

The weather for the week wasn’t amazing (except for the day we shot at Jerrymara Estate – I blogged those photos here). I ended up doing most of my shooting indoors, apart from this series with the toy and some of the solo Bruno ones that I took afterwards that morning. Bruno does his best work before breakfast I’ve found!

Due to previous issues with resource guarding we never have toys lying around at home but holidays generally mean a new toy is bought, for action shots. Trixie and Angel aren’t into playing fetch so it was just me and the boys and the early morning sun.

I wasn’t sure that the group shot with the hats at Jerrymara was up to scratch so I tried it again back at the house, where cows and ducks wouldn’t be a distraction. (I ended up preferring the first attempt.) Afterwards, while I still had the coloured gel on the light, I stuck around for some silly wide angle shots with just Bruno. The next day it was raining, cabin fever was setting in, so I did another shoot, with the cyan gel, on the downstairs sofa. Angel was uncharacteristically cooperative!

As usual the Bruno was my number one model. Just look at that face, how could he not be?!

If that’s not enough Bruno for you, you can see more photos of him from this trip in his Embark DNA test post.

I knew Trixie and Angel had given me their best work at Jerrymara so I only took a few shots of them with the fancy cameras at this location. I took lots of phone pics that week but they’re not blog post material.

We don’t have a nice bathroom at home so I took the opportunity here to do some shooting for my stock image library (coming soon). I planned to recreate a shot from 10 years ago, as well as these ones, but all of my dogs were too big for the prop. I’ll need to find another dog and a nice bathroom.

Fun fact: Bruno detests baths and it’s a struggle trying to get him into the one at home. Maybe if I set up lighting and put a shower cap on him he’ll be more cooperative!

Blue Island has been awarded Australia’s top pet friendly rental. If you’re interested in booking a holiday there, and you’ve never booked through Airbnb before, you can use this code to get $55 in travel credit (full disclosure, I also get $25). Full terms are on their website. If you do go tell Anne I sent you!