Why I Love This Photo: Telling the story of Moti in the moment
Sometimes taking the photo is just the starting point. A completed image happens when you look closely at what you’ve captured and intentionally isolate the elements that truly tell the story. This is what happened with this portrait of Moti. And this is one of the reasons why I love this photo.
Moti is a very high energy, expressive dog. During the session, I got all her moods - goofy, alert, pensive — and I had to be attentive and quick to capture them because she rotated through them in lightening speed. At one point we were having her sit up on an ottoman and during one go around Moti decided to just lay her front legs across the ottoman with her back legs still standing beside it. There was something about that “pose” that looked interesting and since Moti did that behavior on her own I wanted to follow it through. I took some shots in both landscape and portrait orientations. I got some nice ones and then we moved onto some different poses.
Later, when I was reviewing the session, I came back to those frames. At first, they felt disjointed. The awkward placement of her back legs beside the ottoman made the image feel unfinished, like it wasn’t quite working.
But I couldn’t ignore how beautiful her front half looked — the clean line of her legs across the ottoman, the strength in that shape. Then I landed on one frame where her expression was completely regal and still. As a full image, the expression and the body language didn’t quite align. The photograph, as it was, didn’t work.
The original image
And yet, I kept coming back to it. I stared at it longer than the others. That’s when I realized the problem wasn’t the moment — it was the framing.
So I cropped it into a square, isolating her expression and the line of her body across the ottoman. The square crop created a lovely formal composition that invites the viewer’s eye to move organically around the image — from Moti’s expression to her draped paws, along the curve of her rib cage, and back again.
In that instant I knew I had THE portrait. The one that told the story of Moti in that moment — not the whirlwind, not the goofball — but the poised, dignified hound.
If you’re drawn to portraits that reveal more than just your dog’s “smiling for the camera” side — the thoughtful, dignified, unexpected moments — I’d love to create something like this for you.