Ya know…. it’s not always easy being a Big Bear Family Photographer. Sometimes, you have people who want to add in their WHOLE family…. like their four-legged children. And sometimes, those four-legged children don’t cooperate very well.

It’s not any easier when that family is YOURS and those four-legged beasts belong to you. A few weeks ago, my husband and I decided to take a day and go up to Big Bear. Since moving to Twentynine Palms, CA last year, we are just about 1 1/2 hours away from Big Bear. We haven’t seen snow in YEARS and our dogs have never seen it in their whole lives. We were pretty interested to see how our older two, Cali & Capone, would react to it.

If I’m honest about it, I pictured Capone (who loves water and anything cool) rolling around in it like he does sand. While he didn’t do any rolling, he still seemed to be pretty happy there. Cali, who hates water, wasn’t super thrilled about the cold, wet stuff under her feet. At one point we decided to put her sweater on her (yes, my dog has a sweater) and then my husband had to carry her back to the blanket for the photos.

The photo taking process was rather funny. I didn’t bring my remote so it was basically me setting them up, hitting the shutter (which was on a timer), getting into place, trying to re-wrangle the dogs, and smiling in time for the shutter to do its job.

Needless to say, we got some pretty good outtakes and one decent enough to put on our Christmas cards for the year. I got a good photo of each dog, and I was happy enough about that. I also managed to get a couple good ones on my cell phone.

I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as we enjoyed trying to capture them. From my family to yours, Merry Christmas.