Long before I take the camera out of my bag, and in many cases before the dog has even arrived at the location, the photo is already starting to build itself in my head.
 

I have a pretty strange talent I was born with, I remember places extremely well. It’s enough for me to spend some time on Google Earth going through a few streets in a city I’m about to visit, and when I get there I already more or less know the way, where there’s a turn I want to take, where there’s nothing for me to look for and how not to get lost. It’s very useful when a big part of your job is arriving in cities you don’t know and finding photos in them.
 

But I’m not really looking for “beautiful places”. I’m looking for things I can build a frame from. Frames within the environment, corridors, leading lines, converging lines, interesting shapes, textures that can create contrast with the dog, and I’m always looking for “stages” too, places where I can ask the dog to climb up and stand or sit slightly above ground level.
 

I really like these kinds of stages. First of all, they often allow me to photograph the dog from a slightly more noble angle, but they have another small and very useful advantage with dogs whose STAY isn’t particularly impressive. Dogs climb on and off the sofa at home without thinking about it at all, but when we take them into an unfamiliar environment and ask them to climb onto or down from something, very often they’ll take one extra little second to think before moving. It’s also connected to their natural caution around heights. And for a dog photographer, another fraction of a second before the dog decides to get down? That’s a lot of time.
 

When I arrive in a new city and have enough time, I like to go for a walk before the photoshoots and visit the places I’ve already marked in my head through Google. I want to see that they actually exist the way I thought they did, that they’re not under construction, that nobody put a sausage stand right there, an event stage or some kind of religious stand that wasn’t there when Google took the photo. And along the way, you almost always find things Google didn’t show you.
 

When I come across a really good place that I didn’t know about before, sometimes I take out my phone and photograph it. The funny thing is that I almost never actually go back to that photo during the photoshoot. I don’t need to. The simple act of stopping, lifting the phone, choosing the angle and taking the photo somehow photographs the place into my head. The next time I get there, I’ll already remember it.
 

When I find an interesting place, I also don’t look at it only from the direction I arrived from. If it’s a corridor, a long passage, a row of columns or some kind of space that creates beautiful framing, I always look in both directions. The walls and columns might wrap around the frame perfectly, but in the end, the dog’s background will be whatever is at the end of them. If there’s a parked car waiting for me at the end of the corridor in one direction and a clean background in the other, that’s a pretty easy decision.
 

The lens also starts being chosen according to the location, not only according to the dog. If I’ve arrived at a huge location that is simply spectacular, a viewpoint from a cliff, an insane fjord, a beach, a river or a massive church that looks like it was taken from a Hollywood set, I’ll probably go with a wide lens. Why did I come all this way just to cut half the location out?
 

If what interests me is a smaller section of everything I’m seeing, I’ll move to 85mm and longer. In a forest, for example, a wide lens can bring lots of branches, leaves, pieces of sky between the trees and dozens of little details into the frame that steal the focus from the dog. A telephoto lens allows me to isolate a smaller part of the location, flatten the background, blur it more and create much cleaner separation.
 

And despite all that planning, I can still throw the frame I planned into the trash within a few seconds.

I put the dog into the place I planned, look at him, and sometimes it simply doesn’t work. Maybe he’s too big for the framing I saw, maybe too small, maybe his color doesn’t work against the background, maybe his structure simply doesn’t sit there the way I imagined. I’m not going to start fighting with him for ten minutes just because there was a photo there in my head.
 

“Give him a treat, he’s a good boy, but we’re moving to the next spot. We’re not getting a good frame here.”

It happens to me quite often, and I have absolutely no problem with it. The dog doesn’t need to get tired because I insist on proving that an idea I had half an hour ago has to work.
 

Here are a few examples of places we walk past every day, literally every day, and miss the frame that can be created from them.
 

Once I was walking to the bathroom in a shopping mall and had to go through a completely ordinary corridor, the kind of corridor thousands of people walk through every day without looking twice. Something about it just screamed in my head: there could be a great frame here. On another day, I came back with Vienna, when she was still a puppy, and photographed the image you see here.
 

Another time, I saw a passage between columns in the middle of a street in Tel Aviv. I simply liked the lighting, the tones and the way the columns built the space. I arranged a few models, we drove there and photographed.

And that’s exactly why I don’t like arriving at a new location for the first time with the dog already with me and only then starting to search. Photos on Google are a good start, but they’re not enough. If possible, I want to wander around the place myself first. If I can’t, I’ll at least explore it as much as possible through Google Earth and try to understand what’s waiting for me.
 

When the dog is already with me, I want to work.
 

I don’t want to take him on a long, unnecessary walk while I search for something that might be worth photographing. I want to arrive with ideas, know where we’re going, work quickly and precisely, and leave myself enough flexibility to throw away any idea that doesn’t work the moment the dog enters it.
 

Because for me, the photoshoot doesn’t start when I press the shutter.
 

It doesn’t even start when I take the camera out of my bag.
 

Sometimes it starts a few days earlier, when I’m sitting at home, walking through a street in a city I’ve never visited through Google Earth.