Happiness is a Photo Shoot for a Pet Bakery

Let’s just say that doing a shoot for a pet bakery makes it fairly easy to get the talent happy on set — especially when there’s a nearly endless supply of fresh-out-of-the-oven beef and chicken treats on the craft services table. And before you ask, yes I tried one and it did taste just like chicken.

This shoot was for Paw Patch Pasties and we wanted to get a series of happy-dog headshots against cheerfully-colored backgrounds for a marketing piece. We cast from a San Francisco apartment complex where Paw Patch has done a number of events and ended up with a nice range of pup talent in a variety of sizes and colors. Sometimes it can be challenging to get non-studio animals to be comfortable in front of big lights and a weird-looking set but having the treats really helped a lot — especially when trying to convince a few of them to wear a paper birthday hat without destroying it.

For some it required a double-barreled approach: massive numbers of treats plus me making all the animal sounds in my repertoire. Let’s just say that Mark the Goat was popular for this one.

Take a peek at some of the best shots from the day.