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SPOTLIGHT
Vienna Sausage, Jennie & Paris
(click to enlarge)
Naughty girl!
Before Jennie brought in her rescued shepherd mixes Paris and Vienna Sausage, she was somewhat apprehensive. She says, "my girls can be a little much to say the least! But David was awesome. He won them over right away and we had a great time being models!
"In this photo, lovely Mr. Sutton had just busted out the liver treats and Paris could not control herself! I compete in agility with her and so I have always encouraged her to have drive and enthusiasm and she gets rewarded for this. Little did I know that it would make a photo shoot VERY difficult! But David caught on to her game almost immediately. This is one of my favorite photos because it captures Paris's personality so well. She is the love of my life - but man, can she be a naughty girl!
"I had wanted to get these pictures taken for the longest time and just kept putting it off. Then at the beginning of December, Vienna got sick and I had to hospitalize her for a few days. So when she got better, I decided I wanted to get these photos done while they were young and healthy.
"My experience at Sutton Studios was wonderful every step of the way. And when I came back for the consultation to see the pictures, Stacey was fabulous. She helped me with the extremely hard decision of choosing which ones I wanted! I knew that there would be beautiful pictures to choose from but what I loved most was each of their very different personalities came through in the pictures."
Our framing partners
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REFLECTION & REFRACTION
Why black and white?
I just finished watching a slideshow showcasing black and white photos from the current presidential primaries at this website:
No Caption Needed
This site, which explores iconic photographs and the role of photojournalism, is run by Northwestern University Professor Robert Hariman and his colleague at Indiana University John Louis Lucaites.
The black and white photos in this slideshow feature the work of Patrick Andrade, a freelance photographer affiliated with the Atlas Press.
So why black and white?
Living in the digital age as he does and working in a competitive field requiring the near-immediate delivery of his images, there can be little doubt that Mr. Andrade shoots (or as we now say, "captures") his images using a DSLR, not film. That probably means that he captures the images in color and converts them after the fact to black and white.
Photographers can now make this artistic or stylistic choice between color and black and white after considering an existing photograph. This adds another level, another choice to the editing process and gives the photographer another bit of post-capture control. The photographer can actually look at black and white and color versions of the same photo side by side and choose. In this age of digital photography it's altogether likely that a pretty good photo can be made excellent by a process of subtraction.
How different that is from just a decade ago when the choice would have to be made either in deciding which film to load into the camera (in which case that camera body was committed one way or the other for 36 frames), or in grabbing the right camera of two or three hanging from the photographer's neck.
Not long ago if you shot in black and white there was no potential for seeing those images in color. Shooting in black and white required a firm commitment to that medium because there was no turning back once the image was captured and the moment had passed.
So why black and white?
Because subtracting color can add so much to a photo. To my mind, color photos make more of an attempt to create a representation of our world, to objectively recreate a scene. But because they're just photos, they inevitably fall short of that. The colors we see aren't the colors we'd have seen if we had been there. We see a limited range of the scene's original brightness, and many of the scene's colors drop out altogether.
Black and white photos accept these truths from the outset and then, rather than attempt to reproduce a scene, they offer an interpretation by way of reduction. Black and white photos remove an entire layer of potentially distracting information from our experience of an image, paradoxically adding depth and immediacy.
Black and white images also appear more iconic to us - one because they are, and two because they seem to come to us from another era, giving us the idea that they have been and will be around - that they've stood the test of time.
I prefer a good novel to a textbook, so black and white's interpretive approach touches me. Deep in the digital age I continue to choose black and white for my portraiture. Color photographs may attempt to lecture to us, but black and white photos lure us in with a story.
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COMMUNITY FOCUS
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 2008 Calendars
It's not too late to get your Dog Days calendar! These beautiful wall calendars (featuring our equally lovely clients) benefit animal welfare organizations across Chicagoland and help them raise funds for their important work.
Help us help these shelters and humane societies by visiting them to make a donation in exchange for calendars, or stop by the studio and get some from us (we'll give the money to our local shelter).
We still have more calendars to donate! If you work with an animal welfare organization that doesn't yet have some, contact Stacey to arrange a pick-up!
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