Welcome to Week 8 of the Pet Photography 52 Weeks Project.  This week’s theme is “Road Warrior”.

An Idea is born

I haven’t had time this week to shoot for this theme, so I had to think through my past shoots and remembered that last April I did a studio session with our own #3dogkateers with the aim of creating some photos for an idea I had.  My husband Neal was taking 6 months long service leave and we wanted to utilise his time off to search for our seachange/treechange country dream. I came up an idea … “The 3 DogKateers Roadtrip Sessions”.

The idea was to pack us all into the car and take short road trips to discover NSW, meet dog-loving people in the towns we visited and perhaps discover where we really wanted to live. The plan was that I would post about where our next trip would be, so people could book in a “Roadtrip Session” if they lived in the area we were visiting.  I regularly get requests from people who live outside of my service area… people who live in country areas and most commonly, people who live in other states to NSW. My latest project “Teeny Tiny Dogs and their Stories” had so many from interstate saying they’d love to participate but they are in another state.

Speaking of Teeny Tiny Dogs and their Stories.  I guess the “Paws for Thought” Rescue mascot dog is a Road Warrior in his own right!  But this blog post isn’t about Pod (but here he is anyway):

King Pod Road Warrior

The “The 3 DogKateers Roadtrip Sessions” didn’t eventuate as our little Harvey Chops Lyons became very ill as a result of a kennel cough injected vaccination in July last year. When he first got sick, the vet couldn’t work out what was wrong and at first we thought he had a bowel obstruction as he’d stopped eating and was losing weight.  Prior to this injection, Harvey had a bad bout of kennel cough, hence the injection rather than the nasal spray after he’d recovered.  He started getting very sick within a week of the vaccination.  To this day, the fur still hasn’t grown back around the sight of the injection. He had a fever, no appetite, weight loss and lethargy. After about 10 days our vet advised us to take him to a specialist vet. We took him there within a few hours as we were so frightened of losing him. He spent two nights there getting intravenous fluids and an abdominal ultrasound… nothing stuck inside. To cut a long story short, they ended up doing joint taps and discovered that our little boy had Immune Mediated Poly Arthritis (IMPA). So all my focus was on getting him through this and back to health. All up it took 6 months of twice weekly specialist vet visits and blood tests to monitor him through as he was prescribed Prednisolone which is a very strong steroid which needs to be weaned off very carefully.

So, the roadtrip sessions had to take a back seat, but ironically, we found our dream property regardless simply through a real estate app. We’d found a few places we were interested in, but this property ticked all the boxes and we did take two roadtrips to inspect. We purchased the property just before Christmas so this year there will be lots of roadtrips up and back as we transition over the next 6 months before finally moving in around Spring.

I guess I’ve waffled on a bit here as I tend to do!  But getting back to the theme of the week… I took one of the studio photos I took and created this composite… As you can clearly see… I’m no digital artist but I thought it would be a fun way to celebrate “Road Warrior”. What would you do if you saw these three trying to hitch a ride?

Thank you for reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s topic.  Please head on over to check out Linda Perdue from VPShoots Photography serving the Tampa Bay area, Florida for Linda’s take on this topic.

Continue clicking the link at the bottom of each post until you end up right back here.

If you would like to book a photography session for your dog please get in touch as I’d love to meet you.  If you want to join the pack and be kept up to date with the latest news, please sign up here.