This is it, what I finally figured out. One of the things that most intrigues me about photographing animals is how close their expressions are to ours, humans. We really don't know what they're thinking. But as someone who adores animals and has lived with them alll my life, I believe they have the same emotions and feelings as we do. To what degree, who knows, but they are feeling things at their own capacity, their own range, whether it has the depth of human feeling or even bigger. But to the extent they can feel things, we must respect those feelings.

My exploration began with my "Dogs Vs. Ice Cream" (Familius, 2019) project. What I found most fascinating was the the way in which the dogs looked just like we do when we attack the cone. All the expressions... joy, bliss, loathing, love, excitement, gluttony... the doggy ice cream was just the vehicle to get the expressions, which I think show a state of mind. Oh, even my Dog Noir series echoes that. Animals and humans with the same expressions.

So today I had a talk with a new mentor about photography competition. And what he said, at least how I interpreted what he said, was how I captured the gray area where dog merges into human. That place we are the same. And yeah, that's exactly it. Where you recognize not solely a dog or cat... but where you see them on the same scale as people. Honestly, it doesn't always happen. But when you connect, you really see it, even if the animal is not looking directly at you.

It's funny, there is a people and dog photographer I really love, Jane Thomson of Vancouver BC. She is beyond me. She has it figured out. I admire her so much. We know each other a bit... she used to do a lot of work in Los Angeles and she's familiar with the area. She came here a couple of months ago and I had the opportunity to host her at my house for a chat. It was wonderful. And we talk and text now and she always drops little gems of wisdom.

But be that as it may, as much as I want to be exactly like her, I can't. My whatever it is just comes oozing out. I try and rein it in and have the exquisite subtleties Jane captures. Nope. What it is that is me goes outside of the lines Jane has created. And if Jane wanted, she couldn't do me either. We just have something inside of us that is completely our own. But I think what she is going for is exactly the same thing. The humanity of animals.

I always credit Grace Chon as the pet photographer I most wanted to emulate when I started out in 2013. I tried and tried but couldn't get some sort of intrinsic thing she always got out of the animals she photographed. Her current "Healer" series is very much like my "Soul of a Dog" series. Well, I mean, kind of same concept, different execution. But shortly after I discovered Grace, and her very natural lifestyle sort of photography, I ran into Frank Bruynbroek's work. Now his photography was so soulful. And human.

And I think after years of searching, this is what I want my work to represent. The commonality of our expressions, of our feelings.

So that is how it is with animals. We don't know for sure that their expressions are exactly our expressions but we are sure of what we see, what the camera sees. That's what I'm looking for. Maybe not so much the animals being animals, but the animals being human. And by human I mean the emotions we feel and how they look on our faces. I connect with that. Some photographers go for something else. Dogs being dogs. That unbridled joy of a dog being a dog. And I love that. But I don't think that's what I'm going for. Do you see it, too? Tell me.