Well, muscle cramps, facial tic, and lots of sweat - being that I'm 6'3" tall, and the pups...weren't! The shop owner looked at me afterwards when handing over the check, all wrinkled and dripping and disheveled...he shook his head, and goes, "Guess even photos are 'work'." Yah. And don't you forget it, bub.

The pup with the leaves and the scarf was a deliberate composition (I'm creative when exhausted!), I look in fashion magazines and clothing catalogs for ideas like that...and again one of those shots where you click 20 times and toss 19 of them away. Mostly it was three leaves and a tail, a foot, an out of focus head coming at me, etc.

White backgrounds are formulaic, and depending on subject size you need at least two - preferably three (two on the backdrop so that it's even with no hot spots) lights. When you're setting up for them, it's important to have a good distance between the subject and the vertical part of the background paper...in this case, with dogs, about 4 feet. So, roll the paper down from the wall or backdrop stand pretty far.

The idea is that one set of strobes is set for the subject, the other - independently - set for the white paper backdrop.

So first, pop in a teddy bear or something similar in tone to your subject, far forward where you'll have their "mark," and have just the main (key) strobe/light turned on. Dial in that exposure. I fine-tune with a gray & white card from there to make sure the highlights won't blow. Whole process takes just a few minutes of fiddling.

Then, set up one or two lights on the backdrop paper...they'll be a few feet back from the subject, and maybe even scrimmed so that flare won't occur in your lens (I hang black presentation boards from Office Depot). Now, with your camera already set to the key light and main subject, you'll adjust the intensity of the background light(s) only, until you blow them out, or just before - and voila.

A third light, too, can be added from directly above, to keep the horizontal part of hte white paper as close to all-white as possible.

Of course, the whole scheme goes to hell in a handbasket if you can't keep the pup in the forward area where you've metered for the key light, as the background lights will add to the exposure on the dog if it's too close to the back.

Regardless, afterwards, Photoshop is a fine tool for "wholly" whitening anything that remained partly gray.

Does that make sense?