Part I: About Jamie Pflughoeft

JM: Hi Jamie, Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about yourself?
JP: I have always loved animals. When I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and had pet cats, gerbils, rats, frogs, goldfish, and even friendly squirrels we named who swung by the house every day. They were very cute. My favorite squirrel we named Scrappy - because he was missing part of his ear.

I was also always a very creative kid, if not a bit eccentric and moody. I was always drawing or painting or creating something. My parents kept all kind of fun art I designed over the years. I was always winning little awards for my art in grade school. It’s in my blood as my mom was a fine art oil painter and I remember visiting her studio from a young age. I fondly recall the smell or turpentine, and the big coffee cans filled with various brushes.

So my mom was the artist, and my dad has worked in business his entire life, and has an MBA from the same university I graduated from – the University of Washington. It would be fair to say that I got my creative genes from my mom, and my business mind from my dad. It’s an awesome mix and I thank the two of them profusely for hooking up.

It was entirely upon accident that my creativity and love of animals came together to form this pet photography career. I did it as a hobby for a few years before starting a business, never planned to become a professional photographer (it wasn’t even my idea), and never could have imagined myself here, but am so grateful for the path life took me down, because I absolutely love what I do.

JM: What does your family look like today?
JP: Outside of my immediate family (parents and sister), my family consists of me and my sweet little furry girl Fergie. She may have 4 legs, but she’s like my kid and I’d do just about anything for her. (Follow her on twitter at @MissMonkeyPants)

JM: Tell us a bit about when you began to photograph?
JP: I started doing photography with an SLR in 1989 when I was 17. My dad bought me a Pentax film camera for a black and white darkroom class I took. I loved the process of taking pictures, and hated the developing. I was broke and couldn’t afford to develop more than a contact sheet or two at a time, so I put photography on a shelf until about 11 years later when I picked up my camera again when I was working as a dogwalker and petsitter. I loved - loved - taking pictures of my furry charges and did it merely as a hobby for 2-3 years. It was just pure fun. That was the beginning of the path that brought me here.



JM: What formats (eg. Medium, digital, 35mm, etc). do you use for your current work?
JP: Full-frame DSLR, digital all the way. Aside from getting the wide angle shots that I love and capturing loads of detail, I love full frame because it means never having to do math, which I'm terrible at. :P

JM: Photographic education?
JP: My education was one photography class in high school where I shot with black and white film and did my own developing. Beyond that I am self-taught. The long, hard, challenging and interesting way, just the way I like it!

JM: Did you have a lot of photographic influences?
JP: I didn’t really have any photographic influences. I loved taking pictures when I was a teenager, but never followed any other photographer’s work until very recently. You could throw out all sorts of famous photographer’s names and I’d stare at you blankly. I guess for me it’s always been a personal process + personal expression, and not about what other people are doing. It’s also fair to say that my interest has always been first and foremost in animals, and photography is just a way I get to work with them in a fun, creative way. So photography has always been a secondary interest of mine.

If you’d like to know who my favorite photographer is, I can tell you: Stephanie Rausser. She’s based in Sonoma County and does mostly commercial work. Her work is fun, fresh, modern, and gorgeous, and her use of light is phenomenal. She is definitely an inspiration to me. She occasionally photographs the cover of The Bark magazine and did the most recent cover, which I adore (the one with her white dog Harry with the watermelon). I get happy feelings inside when I think of her work. I hope that others feel the same way about mine.

JM: Is fair to say that photography is your 'first' career than? If not, how did you get to this point?
JP: I don’t think I’ve ever had a ‘career’ before. I’ve had lots of fun and interesting jobs, and have done all kind of wacky things in my life. I’ve worked as a focus group recruiter for a marketing research firm, managed snowboard departments in retail stores, worked in a fishing cannery in Alaska, baked muffins at a bakery, worked as a lift operator at a ski resort, and spent a summer abroad in France where I thought I wanted to move to become a teacher. I’ve been all over the map and this is the single thing I’ve done the longest. And after 10 years of shooting animals, 7 of them professionally, I still love doing it, which is a good sign, because I bore easily.

As for how it became a business, it’s kind of a long story, so I’ll see if I can make it short. I mentioned before, I transitioned to professional pet photography accidentally after doing it as a hobby for several years. I was working as a dog walker and live-in petsitter and would photograph all of my client’s pets when they were away on vacation. Still using the ancient Pentax film camera and black and white film. It received rave reviews and I would sell my clients an 8x10 print or 2 for the cost it took me to have them printed at Ivey Seright. I created a little printed portfolio and carried that around with me. It was all for fun, to fulfill a need in me to express myself creatively.

I had graduated from college at the age of 30 with the intention of becoming a dog trainer (I studied animal behavior in school- a division of the psychology department at the UW). The economy was horrible, I really wasn’t very good at training, and so I continued my quest to find the perfect business to start, all the while photographing animals, never once considering that as a career option.

I was bemoaning my situation for the umpteenth time when a friend suggested I turn my pet photography into a hobby. I was like “is that even a job?”. I had NO idea. So I googled it. And was amazed that people were actually making a living at what I had been doing for years for, ahem- free.

So within a couple of months I had a business license and started working on some basic crappy branding and promotional materials, had set up an awful website and stared booking paid shoots. Ok, actually, at that point it took me 6 months to be ready to do paid shoots, but by then I had clients ready and waiting for me. It was the perfect storm. I’m proud to announce that in my first month of official operation I grossed over $4k.

That was 7 years ago, and after many ups and downs, countless challenges, a couple of burnout periods and a lot of self-doubt, I now have a business I am proud of. It has been totally worth all of the blood sweat and tears to get here.

I now have fantastic clients, a great schedule, and just the kind of balance in my life I had hoped to achieve as a business owner.

JM: What is it that you feel draws you to pet photography versus other professional photographic ventures?
JP: Easy- Dogs! I can’t imagine my life without working with canines. Given all of the other options out there to work with animals, I think photographing them is a natural fit for me given my creative proclivities. It’s non-invasive, I don’t need to see animals in pain, I get to work with awesome people who love their pets as much as I do mine and I get paid to do something I love. I can tell you for sure that if I wasn’t photographing them I’d be working with animals in some way. At least, I would hope to be. I think a little part of my soul would die if I didn’t get to meet and work with various pooches on a regular basis. To me they are a little piece of heaven on earth.

JM: Are you doing other paid portrait/professional work?
JP: I do commercial photography too, but that’s also all of pets. I also design art from the photos that I take called ‘Decopaw’ and provide that as an option to my clients as giclee prints on canvas. I don’t photograph anything other that pets- specifically dogs and cats (it’s about 85% dogs; 15% cats), never have and probably never will. Pets are my passion! I’m also, ahem, pretty bad at photographing other things, because I have little experience aiming my camera at anything that doesn’t have fur on it. A recent little photo shoot to get pictures of my mom’s ring to use on Ebay took me 5 hours and multiple tries. All I needed was 3 decent photos. So yeah, it’s gotta be pets.

JM: What made you feel the confidence in order to go pro?
JP: I think the fact that I had been doing pet photography for several years, and was getting really great feedback on my images, and my petsitting clients were paying me for prints really helped me feel confident enough to charge for my services. I guess you could say I ‘accidentally’ built it and they came. I had no idea that what I was doing was portfolio building, and went about so many things in the wrong way. But I really never set out to be a professional photographer. Like I said it was just fun. It was something I did between school and ‘the next phase in my life’, which ironically turns out to be this. I could have never predicted that this career would be the next phase in my life. I still pinch myself at how awesome that is.

In terms of when I made the move to full time, I felt that I didn’t really have any choice when I quit my ‘day job’, which didn’t really count as a day job anyway considering I was working as a part time dog walker and making maybe $850 per month. But hey, it was still a steady paycheck!

What happened was, my client load and responsibilities with Cowbelly got so great, and so overwhelming, that I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by trying to work both another part time job and run my photography business. And given the fact that I had a filled pipeline, and an extremely busy business at the time, it made saying goodbye to a consistent paycheck a little less scary. It was easier knowing that I had a high demand for my services as it made me feel like I might actually be able to make it over the long term. And in terms of being ‘pro’ I didn’t call myself a photographer until I had been running the business for over 4 years. I was a mental block I had to get over. Because I had no formal photography training I felt at times like an imposter. I’m over that now. After running this business since 2003, and making a full time living at it since 2005, I can now (finally) proudly say I am a ‘professional photographer’. (


JM: What motivates you in the work that you do?
JP: All kinds of different things. Mostly it’s just observing animal behavior and being inspired by who my subjects are. I majored in psychology with an emphasis in animal behavior in college as an adult student, which was shortly before I started my business, so that is something I take into my shoots with me. I love watching how canine (and feline) minds work, and just getting to capture them being themselves is so cool. I am pretty much a fly on the wall in my shoots. Ok, well, an interactive fly, but I generally let them do their own thing.

I am also greatly inspired by nature. I love just being outside. I think that comes from my days as a dogwalker because I was outside for hours every day just observing and taking things in, breathing the air, sensing the space I was in. I get inspired by bark, and trees, and the colors of houses, and flowers and the color of pavement when wet, all kinds of random things.

I am also inspired by really urban environments because I am also a city girl through and through. I have been working on what I call my ‘Graffiti Dogs Project’ since 2008 and it’s the marriage of two of my favorite things: graffiti and dogs. And all of the shoots are always in really gritty (sometimes sketchy) environments. That’s one of the things that gives the shots their ‘cool’ quality. It’s authentic, which is something I strive for in all of my work. I am like the ‘anti-pose’ ‘anti-produced’ shooter. I think I’d do well as a photojournalist if I couldn’t photograph dogs and cats. Perhaps a job as a photojournalist who covers the drama and late-breaking news at a dog show like Westminster would suit me well.

JM: You are talking about what inspires you, but what motivates your work?
JP: If I had to pick a one-word answer, it would be: fun. For me it's fun to photograph dogs and cats. It's fun meeting them, it's fun interacting with their parents, it's fun seeing the images afterward, it's fun processing them in Lightroom. It's fun seeing the finished products. I guess I'm a little bit spoiled in that I think, and expect, life to be fun. Now, life isn't always fun, and sometimes it's really really (really) hard, but the more fun I can create in my life, the happier I am. 
If I had to pick a two-word answer, it would be: fun and creative expression The creative expression part is more complex and hard to define. I've come to the point, good or bad, that I can't fully experience something cool without needing to take a picture of it. It's a drive inside of me that I suspect will never go away. I don't know why it's there, and I don't really have an objective when it comes to the outcome of the photo, but I guess it's the process of taking photos that is now hard-wired into my brain. The best I can understand it is that drive is from my innate need to express myself creatively. A drive that has been there since childhood. Perhaps it's hard-wired into my genes? Hmm, that could be a great topic of philosophical discussion! Anyone care to start a forum post on topic?