We were super excited to see so many of you guys – some for the first time, some once again.

No recap would be complete without a few pictures, so, without further ado, here are some of my favorite photos from the weekend.

Hope to see you guys soon.

BUT, in even bigger news, Fox Rain is proud to announce a collaboration with tinybat to produce some dog-themed cards that will be sold at our booth.  These aren’t just ANY mouth-wateringly-cute, heart-breakingly adorable cards, though: 100% will go to support Animal Refuge Kansai (ARK) based in Japan.

ARK is a non-profit organization in Osaka, Japan that rescues animals. They are currently working to rescue animals that were abandoned or lost as a result of the unfathomably destructive tsunami that hit Japan.

Dogs, unfortunately, are often forgotten or abandoned during panicked times of crisis, but, as people rebuild from the ruin, dogs can serve as faithful rally point for families to help them through some of the toughest times of their lives.

If you want to learn more about ARK, and support their efforts, check out their website: drupal.animalrefugekansai.org

And, of course, check out a preview of the artwork that will be going on these cards.

See you guys at the show!

Courtesy Joel Yum of The Image Interviews

I had the absolute pleasure of being interviewed by Joel Yum for his website The Image Interview.

For those who’ve never heard of this project before, he documents Toronto-area creatives and the spaces they live and work in.  It’s an intensely interesting project and definitely piques at the curiosity we all have at how other people work behind their closed doors.

He cleverly orchestrates his interviews through an almost exclusive use of images (hence the site’s namesake) where the subject would write out their answers. It was a uniquely interesting experience to be interviewed. And by interview, I mean just hanging out, talking shop with another photographer about how we both work, how we internalize abstract concepts into tangible forms and why we do what we do.

Photographers often do much of their professional development in relative isolation, so it’s always interesting to hear about the different paths we journey through.

The experience underscored the important difference between usable, intelligible sound-bytes and the colloquial rambling that I produce. Note to self: please work on verbal clarity.

So, book off a coffee break and check out some addictively-page-turning work over at theimageinterview.com.

Loving this idea for an art project. Especially because it’s going towards an animal shelter. Spread the word, there are so many dogs out there that need a loving home and so many people who work to making sure as many dogs as possible find one.

Posted from Creativity:

To help New York animal shelter and adoption service Mighty Mutts, creatives at McCann NY tied tiny digital cameras to dog collars and created art from a dog’s eye view.

The cameras took random shots at intervals, and the resulting ‘portraits’ are being displayed in downtown art gallery Biscuits & Bath – in what’s said to be the world’s first art exhibition produced entirely shot by dogs. Dogtography NY will launch this Thursday with a viewing attended by both the dogs and their owners- some of whom are famous artists themselves. All proceeds go to Mighty Mutts.

Check out the show running March 10-12 in NYC: Dogtography NY

Buy some prints to support the shelter in their store hosted by the good people at Big Cartel.

Not entirely sure what one would need it for nor why bathing your pet would need to be so frequent as to merit a machine for it. But here you go:

A University of Toronto anthropologist discovered remains of a red fox beside humans in a 16,500 year old excavation of a cemetery.

Not to be mistaken as coincidence, at least two graves were found with foxes buried with humans. According to the article, when one of the graves had been previously opened and the human body moved, as the fox’s remains were moved along with it – such was its significance.

Foxes are not without their difficulties in being domesticated which is likely why dogs won out in the thousands of years between then and now. Which is not to say people aren’t trying: there is a breeder in Russia who has recently partnered up with an American distributor to distribute domestic silver foxes.

These Siberian foxes are more tame than their wild counterparts and have been specifically bred to be friendly with humans. Intriguing to be sure.

Perhaps “Fox Rain” was a better choice than anyone would have thought after all.

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You can check out the full (albeit short) article over at the Winnipeg Free Press.

Super cute image of a Siberian fox pup taken from SibFox

Was really unsure as to what I should focus on — technical camera work; my creative process; the conceptual flow of a shoot.  Finally, I realized I should focus on the thing that many people gloss over or never even consider: dropping what you’re doing to follow your passions.

The profile evolved into a brief chronicle about that narrow slice of my life when I was pondering the existential question of what I should choose to do with my life (you know, that whole idea that you have absolutely freedom to choose what you do in life, but with the caveat that you are simultaneously responsible for that absolutely free choice).  It was a really tough choice between remaining a web developer, where I somehow felt something was missing, and becoming a photographer that promised a more creative life path.

Reading it over, I was beside myself with disbelief: I’d have never thought this meandering line through life would have been my own.

You can check out the article here: Slice of Humble Pie.

They also asked for a follow up article about some tips to shooting pets, so be on the look out for that.

A UK-based artist, Martin Usborne, just closed his show MUTE: The Silence of Dog’s in Cars at London’s theprintspace.

The photos have this particularly unique aesthetic that makes for extremely memorable images, but they also – and this is perhaps the most difficult thing to achieve – connect with the viewer on an incredibly deep, primal level.  These images, perhaps precisely because his focus is on dogs and not, say, children left in cars, resonate with people in a simultaneously anonymous and ubiquitous way.

In an interview by the Toronto Star, Martin said that his motivation for the series came from that universal feeling we all have from time to time: the fear of being alone that he was left with after being left in a car while his parents went into a supermarket.

You can check out more the haunting images from the series on Martin’s website here.

And then go pet your dog and let them know you’d never abandon them.

It talks about this border-collie, Chaser, who had learned the names of over a thousand different objects.  John (Chaser’s owner) would spend four to five hours a day training Chaser, going through memorization drills, much like how we would learn a new language.

Chaser loved the exercises, being a border-collie, :

Border collies are working dogs. They have a reputation for smartness, and they are highly motivated. They are bred to herd sheep indefatigably all day long. Absent that task, they must be given something else to do or they go stir crazy.

After Chaser had learned his roughly thousand nouns, they moved on to learning verbs.  So, in addition to being able to fetch objects, Chaser also knows how to nose and paw a requested object.

Interestingly, and much to their credit for scientific due diligence, they do mention the “Clever Hans” effect:

“Haunting almost every interaction between people and animals is the ghost of Clever Hans, a German horse that in the early 1900s would tap out answers to arithmetic problems with his hoof. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Hans would get the answer right only if the questioner also knew the answer. He then showed that the horse could detect minute movements of the questioner’s head and body. Since viewers would tense as Hans approached the right number of taps, and relax when he reached it, the horse knew exactly when to stop.”

There was an article I had read long ago, in a similar vein, that similarly argued that animals were much smarter than we humans give them credit for. It was about a parrot that, defying the usual idea that they simply mimic human speech, displayed intelligence of an animal with “a much larger brain”.   For instance, it could point out which shape was a square or a circle, given the choice.

More astonishingly, and showing even an deeper level of thinking, it could point out which of two squares was larger.  The researchers were baffled – the consensus among the scientific community had been that comparative functions were far beyond the ability of parrots.

Something to think about over your morning coffee – perhaps behind that dorky stare, your dog is secretly contemplating the meaning of life.  Maybe.

You can read the full NY Times article here.

I know most of you guys that read this blog are already dog owners, but it’s nice to be reminded of the absolutely unconditional love and admiration these creatures have for their owners.

Oh, and pass it along to anyone you know considering adopting a pet and ask them to consider a rescue dog from your local shelter. Some of the best friends you’d ever meet are just sitting and waiting there for the right person.

Warm thy hearts!