FidoJournalism Profiled

Cedar is a 16-year-old shelter mutt who has seen better days. The bones of her spine protrude from her back, the fur on her muzzle and paws has gone gray, and she spends most of her days curled up in her dog bed in front of the gas fireplace in her apartment home in D.C. But all of this disappears through the lens of Stephen Bobb’s camera.

Bobb, 31, is the man behind FidoJournalism, a pet photography business serving the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area. He has been commissioned to take pictures of Cedar as a surprise Christmas gift to her owner, Amy, a job for which he’s ideally suited.

That’s because Bobb’s philosophy of pet portraiture is a departure from the standard setup of costumes, backdrops and posed shots. Bobb instead tries to capture animals’ personalities by allowing them to go about their normal activities – playing with toys, going on walks to favored locales, or spending time with their owners. This style of photography places Bobb in precarious positions – on the floor on his stomach, legs splayed; occasionally resulting in a lens filled with slobber – but also results in candid-style photographs that, as Bobb puts it, “tell a story.”

The session he has scheduled with Cedar, Bobb cautions on the way to her apartment, probably won’t be like this. “I don’t think she moves around a lot, so it might be more posed,” he warns, maneuvering into an empty parking spot on the street. “Which is fine. I can work with that.”

But when Chrissy Gephardt opens the door to the apartment, Cedar bounds out, tail wagging, excited to meet the newcomers. It takes a few moments of wrangling to settle her down, and when Gephardt heads upstairs to retrieve the contract for the portrait session, Cedar follows her.

Bobb takes the opportunity to acclimate his camera to the room’s lighting. “I like to get the details, too,” he says, taking a few shots of the fireplace, which is decorated with five embroidered Christmas stockings – one for Chrissy, one for Amy, one for each of Chrissy’s two cats, and of course, one for Cedar.

Cedar trots back into the living room at Gephardt’s heels and, instead of settling into her dog bed as Bobb thought she would, starts to do slow laps around the room. He tries to follow her, shooting, but ends up with mostly photos of the floor. “You can see some of the challenges of the job already,” he says wryly.

After pacing for a few minutes, Cedar climbs into her dog bed and rests her head tiredly on her crossed paws. Bobb crouches near her, camera poised, and she regards him warily.
“She’s like, ‘who are these people? Do they have needles?’” Gephardt says. “She’s really tired of people coming over and poking at her.”

Bobb takes a moment to stroke the side of Cedar’s face, tousling her floppy black ears, before stretching on the floor on his stomach in front of her. He positions his camera, and whispers “Hi, baby” to Cedar as he scoots closer to her. Soon, the only sound in the room is of the shutter clicking as he takes shot after shot.

“She seems really relaxed around you,” Gephardt notes with some surprise. Indeed, Bobb is now just inches away from Cedar’s face as she lays in her dog bed, the lens at nose-level, shutter clicking, and she barely reacts.

“She normally growls at people she doesn’t know,” Gephardt continues. “I guess she senses that you’re animal-friendly.” Though an unusual reaction for Cedar, this is characteristic of dogs during a Bobb photo shoot.

“Stephen is very natural in the way that he shoots the dogs - he has a wonderful rapport,” said Frances Molinaro, 33, who received a portrait session with her dog Giuseppe as a birthday gift from her husband. Giuseppe was “oblivious to the fact that he was being photographed most of the time, because Stephen just follows him around and lets him do what he likes to do. There were times when he would get on the ground and close up to the dog, and he didn’t mind at all.”

Giuseppe is not a shy dog, but Bobb’s magic works on less people-friendly canines as well.

Take Liora, for example: a Saluki-Afghan hound mix rescued from the Israeli-Lebanese war who usually shies away from photo ops.

“You know how cameras click?” asked Karis Graham, 45, who adopted Liora from a dog rescue in Arlington and purchased the portrait session for Liora and her canine brother, Sabra. “I think she thinks they’re guns, because she freaks out. But with Stephen, he’s so natural – he slowly introduced the camera, got on the grass with them, and just let them warm up and be who they were in their own environment. It takes a really talented person to do that. He was so good with them.”

Though Bobb has always loved dogs – he grew up with a golden retriever, Hennessy, and now owns two dogs of his own – he has only been shooting them professionally for just under a year. He spent eight years working at a non-profit in D.C., and while still working there enrolled in the Washington School of Photography, a nine-month certification program.

“I had always had an appreciation for photography,” Bobb said. “After I lost my job, I wanted to try something creative and artistic.”

After graduating from the program, Bobb began looking for assistantships with wedding photographers who exemplified the photojournalistic style he was hoping to perfect. Jennifer Domenick, co-owner of Love Life Images, was the first to respond, and Bobb went to work weekends at her studio, where he remains, full time, today.

Though he was spending his work days professionally immersed in photography, Bobb spent his free time taking pictures of his home life, which included his dogs, Jingles and Cooley. Pictures of the pair abounded in his home, including a spread on the wall in his dining room. When Domenick came to collect him for a wedding the two were shooting together, she paused in front of the frames.

“She said, ‘Stephen, you should really be a pet photographer,’” Bobb recalled. “That was the first time I thought seriously about doing it professionally.”

To promote FidoJournalism – named for his signature candid style – Bobb went to local pet boutiques and left business cards, emblazoned with a picture of Jingles and Cooley, with the owners. The pet industry has changed in recent years with the addition of more “doggy couture,” said Bobb, which is a type of clientele who treat their pets as family – a market that, understandably, comprises a fair amount of his clients.

Bobb would ideally like to focus equally on weddings and pet sessions, and has gleaned much of his pet portrait style from his time with Domenick’s studio.

“I was definitely looking to tell a story; to capture real moments with real people and pets and personalities, so I did kind of take it from shooting weddings,” Bobb said. “The wedding photography industry in general has shifted from posed, formal shots to a more candid style, and I thought that would happen to pet photography too – and that I could be on the cutting edge of that trend.”

It seems easy for Bobb to explain his philosophy of pet photography, but when asked what drives him to do it, he struggles to put it into words. He wants to tell a story, to capture personalities, to catch pets doing what they love to do, he says.

The website for Love Life Images states, “we don’t just photograph weddings and portraits. We document love and life.” On his website, Bobb echoes this sentiment, writing, “These unscripted moments capture the true essence of our pets, their personalities and our relationships with them. Through photography, we can hold on to them forever.” This, then, must be why he does it – to freeze a moment in a pet’s life; to let the owners keep them near, always.

Back at Chrissy Gephardt’s apartment, Bobb’s photo session with Cedar is winding down. She seems to tire, rising from her bed as if to signal the end of her posing, her paws sliding on the hardwood floors as she walks.

Bobb detaches his lens with a click and places it in the rolling suitcase where he stores his photo equipment, and Cedar’s eyes follow him, beseechingly, as if asking him to please make sure she looks pretty in the photos. Though she didn’t provide him with a large variety of poses, Bobb hopes to get 40 to 50 usable shots from the session – a large selection, with different angles and lighting to choose from.

Four days after he leaves Gephardt’s apartment, the images of Cedar are ready for previewing in a password-protected online gallery. Though Bobb hasn’t done any editing to hide her age – the gray fur is prominent on her muzzle and around her eyes; her boniness is evident – an innocent onlooker wouldn’t assume that she is an old, tired mutt. Her ears flop innocently and she looks straight into the lens, her eyes deep and expressive. Her paws rest on the edge of her dog bed, and she looks at once calm and alert.

Gephardt is thrilled with the results. “I teared up when I was watching the slideshow,” she admits. Her favorite image, she says, is the first in the online slideshow – a shot of Cedar in her dog bed, paws up, head tilted, ears akimbo. “It just reminds me of her. When I see that photo, that’s Cedar, you know?”

Gephardt has already placed her order with FidoJournalism, requesting a paperback coffee table book and a photo printed on canvas and stretched on a frame, ready to hang – both Bobb specialties.

“I think Amy’s going to adore it,” Gephardt says of Cedar’s owner. “I think she’s going to go nuts, she’s going to die. She’s gonna be like, that’s the best thing ever.

“I wish I had done this before,” she adds. “I just think, what a great gift to have. You can have that forever.”

Kate Elizabeth Queram is a graduate student at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism