The approach that we took for this project was to capture animals in their normal, everyday environment with full length portraits and then showcase their personality with tighter head shots on a white background.  One hurdle that we encountered was getting the animals to stand and face the way we wanted them to.  Some of the animals were used to a lead but the majority had no grasp of verbal commands, except for the horses and the Randall cattle that were much easier to work with.  It was a delicate dance of patience, bribing with food and luck to wrangle these animals, but thankfully we had phenomenal help from two of the farm managers, Victoria and Daniel.  Another hurdle was that we couldn’t come in contact with the Scottish Highland (Petunia) at all, so logistically it became a situation where we set everything up and waited for her to walk into the frame and pray that she looked straight at the camera. Probably the most unnerving part of the entire shoot was being the only one in the paddock with Petunia.  Everyone else was on the other side of the fence and the only advice I was given from the managers was, ‘well if she starts to charge you, just leave the camera sprint for the fence’.  Luckily there was no sprinting involved.

Nubian Goat

Delaware Chicken

Scottish Highland

 Milking Shorthorn

The lighting for these portraits was really simple.  We wanted to keep it as naturally lit as possible so we added two soft boxes on either side of the animal to provide just a little bit of fill.

A lot of these breeds are, in a way, living history and helped our forefathers and early settlers cultivate the land.  There are some organizations out there such as The Livestock Conservancy (not affiliated with this project) whose sole mission is genetic conservation and the promotion of heritage breeds.

Dwarf Nigerian

Jacob Ram

Alpaca

Randall Ox

The entire portrait series can be seen on our portfolio: Heckscher Farm and Heritage Breed Livestock

Below are just a few of the behind the scene images.

Daniel wrangling some goats on the left and myself being investigated by one of the resident llamas

Candice + Petey, keeping things real.  All day long.

I am going to ease in with something simple, just an image I love.  For a million reasons, but most notably; the light, her expression, the relationship between her and the dog, a sense of ‘everything is ok’ when you look at this image.  More to come from Candice and Petey, but for now just this one.

As some or most of you know our Dogs Ink gallery show  is ending this weekend, however before we pull down the images and pack up the show we are wrapping things up with a fundraiser to support the local SPCA.  There will be food + beverages, a raffle , silent auction and a really good time.  Come by check out the show and support a really good cause!

All the info is below:

If you’ve been looking at hooking your pooch (or cat) up with some toys and treats then we’ve got you covered.

Head on over to Petbox and check these guys out!  Premium pet toys and products delivered to you monthly. Simple and easy.

Instead of writing a bunch of stuff that you probably won’t read we’ve elected to use a simple math equation.

Petbox + your dog = super amped dog.  That simple.

Oh!  We get to save you money too, use DOGSRULE  as your petbox discount code at checkout to save 10% off.

Win-Win for everyone, Happy Monday!

Magic has elected to use his toys as he sees fit.  There is no such thing as directions when you are a dog.

]]> http://tyfoster.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=8119 0 http://tyfoster.com/blog/?p=8109 http://tyfoster.com/blog/?p=8109#comments Mon, 07 Jul 2014 19:32:39 +0000 http://tyfoster.com/blog/?p=8109 Here we go!  We’re all hung up and ready to rock and roll.

Our Dogs Ink show will be up in Guts N’ Glory for the entire month of July with a fundraiser for the SPCA on August 9th.

If you are looking for something to do this month, I recommend you check out Rosendale the weekend of July 19th and 20th.  A massive street festival will be going on and you can stop by and check out our gallery!

I am not sure how many of you have read the article that Time magazine published  on June 20th of 2014, but if you haven’t, it’s all about pit bulls; the statistics of pit bull attacks, a few details about specific attacks and the collected opinions from PETA and DogBite.org.

An interesting article but slanted nonetheless.  Let’s start at the top, beginning with the title: “The Problem with Pit Bulls”.  The problem with pit bulls is that there is a lot of truth to the stereotype of the breed.  They’re strong, stocky and built to defend themselves.  They’re a utilitarian breed that was purposely built, so to speak.  But the idea that every pit bull is dangerous is like saying every Muslim is a radical Muslim bent on wreaking havoc towards the United States. 100% of the planes flown into American buildings were flown by Muslims.  Taken out of context, that statistic is scary.

Time magazine quotes The Daily Beast  by stating that pit bulls lead the most dangerous breed list with 159 fatalities a year.  The death toll in 2010 due to gun deaths according to the CDC  was 31,672.  Let’s take a second and examine this.  A pit bull is an animal that doesn’t have the ability to reason, sit down and contemplate decisions.  Arguably, it knows what its owner has taught them but it doesn’t have the innate sense of ‘right and wrong’ and if it does, it certainly isn’t the same as a humans.  The ‘right and wrong’ is trained into it by its owner.  Whether fighting is ‘right or wrong’, it all comes down to how they are raised, not how it is bred.  Humans on the other hand, do have an innate sense of what is right and wrong.  We know that killing or fighting someone else is wrong yet 31,672 were killed by other humans with guns in one year.   The CDC reports that in 2010, 2,468,435 people died in the US alone.  From this we figure .0001% of deaths a year are attributed to pit bull attacks vs .012% from guns.  That’s 120x more deaths a year because of intentional human violence vs. provoked or otherwise unspecified pit bull attacks.  In other words, we never truly find out why a pit bull attacks a human as you can’t put them on trial.  We don’t know whether they were provoked or whether it was trained to attack, but what we do know is that humans(in 2010) intentionally went out of their way to get a gun and kill 120x more people; intentionally being the operative word.

So the question is, why don’t we hold ourselves to the same standards as we do pit bulls?  According to TIME and their 20 year old data that they collected from the CDC, : “A CDC report on dog-bite fatalities from 1978 to 1998 confirms that pit bulls are responsible for more deaths than any other breed, but the CDC no longer collects breed-specific information.”  Nothing like accurate, up-to-date information.  Hate to keep hammering this point home, but humans have always accounted for 100% of the gun related deaths and as I stated above with 4 year old data from the CDC vs. 20 year old data(which Time used), humans still have intentionally killed 120x more humans than pit bulls and that doesn’t account for all the conflicts, wars, massacres and school shootings; it only includes homicides, suicides and accidental shootings.

By themselves, guns do not kill people.  It takes human involvement.  I would venture to say that without human involvement pit bulls might just be another breed of dog.

TIME goes on to say and quote Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA’s senior vice president of cruelty investigations, “PETA stands by breed-specific sterilization as a common-sense solution to what has become a human-safety issue. “These dogs were bred to bait bulls. They were bred to fight each other to the death,” she said. “Just because we’re an animal-rights organization doesn’t mean we’re not concerned about public safety.”

PETA is concerned about public safety as much as every politician is.  As long as they can get your vote and support they will say just about anything.  Might I add that in May of this year, PETA stated that cows milk causes autism.  Spreading unsubstantiated information is PETA’s idea of ‘concerned about public safety’.  So maybe take what PETA says with a grain of salt.

Oh wait, hey TIME, it’s cool that you included PETA in your article as a point of contention; ‘Hey everyone, look even PETA doesn’t like pit bulls and they like all animals so we must be unbiased”. TIME, did you forget about the article you wrote in April of last year about how PETA kills 90% of all animals brought to their shelters?  How much does PETA really care about animals?

We as a human race are supposedly the most intelligent beings on the planet; as such we also have the responsibility to take care of the planet and the animals on it.  However we continue to build bigger cities and increasing urban sprawl as a result and then we are surprised when wolves eat our cats or we find black bears in our backyards.  So we go out and kill the wolves and the bears because they pose a threat.  We kill deer because they are over populated and we train pit bulls to fight and then we kill pit bulls because they fight.  Wolves don’t want to be in our backyard, but they have nowhere to go, pit bulls fight because that’s what they have been trained to do, not bred to do.

Instead of blaming the gun for homicides, wolves for loss of domestic property and pit bulls for fighting how about we look at the real problem, us.