AHS Employee Spawtlight: Photography Department

This month, we spoke with Alex DeForest, Lauren Klinge and Jessica Greene from our Photography Department about why visual storytelling is so important to our mission. You can read highlights from our chat on our blog but be sure to watch their full interview to learn all about how they support our efforts to serve our community’s pets and people.

For people who may not know what goes on in our Photography Department, can you describe what you and your teammates do? Why is photography so important to AHS’ mission?

The photo team photographs all the animals for adoptions, we photograph all the animals for the foster website, and sometimes we help out the rescue team with their photos. We also photograph most of the events for other departments, like the annual Compassion with Fashion fundraiser, and we photograph retail items for our website, for thrift and for Petique. We just photograph everything, whatever comes up to help as many animals as possible.

We show off the animals in their best possible light, which is why we decided to photograph them in a professional manner, in a studio setting, to get the best possible photo of every animal. The reason we do that is because we want people to fall in love with them on the website versus just feel bad for them. We do the visual parts of storytelling for AHS.

Do you remember a special day on the job that has stuck with you ever since? Tell us about it.

Yes, I think about it very frequently actually. I was following a story of a puppy who was being treated in our Parvo ICU at the old building in Sunnyslope, and I would spend pretty much every day, whenever I could, photographing and shooting video of this puppy named Belle. I got pretty attached. This was over the course of a few weeks as she went through her parvo treatment.

Her outlook was not great, but our parvo team saved her. The most memorable part of that was when she was reintroduced to the team that saved her months later, after she’d been adopted. That was pretty awesome. Filming that photographing it, and I produced one of my best photos of all time of the adopter with Belle after she was all grown up. That was easily my favorite moment.

Obviously working in animal welfare can sometimes be emotional, is there anything you all do here in Photography to support each other?

We definitely put on some great music playlists and have little dance parties. We also just spend a lot of extra time with the cute sweet animals. Sometimes we need them just as much as they need us.