Welcome  to

Paw  Print  Photos

Japan Kanazawa Kite Festival Japan Kanazawa Kite Festival

Over the last few months we’ve been working hard to put together this website. Actually, it’s the first website we’ve ever built and we did it on our own. Like everything we do, we have worked from the ground up to realize our vision.

Paw Print Photo is the first of a number of websites we have coming, but for the moment we’ll just focus on what we have created here.

We created this website for a several reasons:

  1. We wanted to start offering our photo services professionally.
  2. We desired a place to show our work.
  3. We sought to create a platform where we could expand our business opportunities, which go beyond photography.

Crisis or opportunity?

Turkey Istanbul Byzantine Church Turkey Istanbul Byzantine Church

Creating this website ended up being a lot more work than we first envisioned. Surprisingly, the actual look of the website came together fairly quick. We had the basics of the site finished in about 12 hours. The hard part came when we realized that a lot of our professional portfolio was in a less desirable shape than we would have liked.

You can breakdown doing photography into two parts; the first is creating the image (the act of taking the photo) and the second is enhancing the image in post-production. It’s just a fact that all professional photographers process their work, or have another professional touch up their work for them.

The most common mistake that photographers, even professionals, make when they touch up their work is over-processing. Photos that have been over-processed will have extreme and unnatural colors, look too sharp, and/or just fake looking. The second most common mistake is not using the histogram to achieve the correct level of exposure. That’s a bit technical, however. Simply put, the end results are photos that are underexposed or overexposed.

Landscape Japan Shizuoka Mt. Fuji Landscape Japan Shizuoka Mt. Fuji

How did we fare when looking back at our work? In some ways good, in other ways not so much. Our current work, from the last few years, was in tiptop shape, but the further we went back, the more we found that photos were over-processed and not correctly exposed.

There are a few reasons for this. Over the years we’ve upgraded to better cameras, better lenses, and better monitors. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop have improved as well. Our skill at using all these tools has also vastly improved. The end results are better looking photos.  

Rather than just doing a quick pass, we went all the way down the rabbit hole, searching through all our entire collection and re-processing a good number of older photos. We also found plenty of photos that had never been processed, like from out trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia from 2007.

There were also quite a few panoramas that were in poor shape. The technology for processing panoramas has come a long way in the last few years. Below you can see a rather disappointing outcome from a panorama of the Valley of the Gods (Utah, United States) processed in 2012. The same photos were used to create a far superior version in 2019.

Valley of the Gods PanoramaValley of the Gods Panorama

This is just the beginning of our journey. Now that this website is up, we plan to be very active. We will be posting about all kinds of things photo and travel related, so come back often. This will be a great place to see photos that don’t make it on to the official portfolio pages as well.

On a final note, if you know someone that’s looking for a photographer, send them our way. We’re affordable, professional, and ready to help capture moments.