Back on the beach with Laura and the sausage dogs
Every year before the Southwold Sausage Walk, Laura and I head down to the beach with a dachshund or two and make the promo pictures that go on the event website and across social media. Laura is the organiser, and we’ve worked together for many years now. It’s one of the shoots I look forward to most, partly because the dogs never do quite what you planned and partly because Laura knows exactly what the event needs from the pictures. This year we added something new. Alongside the stills, we filmed a short promotional video, and that video was the main reason we were out there.
Why we shot on the beach by the harbour
The walk is on Sunday 18 October and starts at 10am. The whole point of the morning was telling people when and where it happens, so we shot on the beach near Southwold Harbour, in the dunes and marram grass and down on the open sand. The lighthouse and the pier sit in the background of a lot of the frames. For a promo image that matters more than any clever lighting. Anyone who knows Southwold recognises those two landmarks straight away, and anyone who doesn’t gets a fair idea of where they’ll be standing on the day.
Nel, Lenny, Laura and Zoe
Laura brought Nel, a black and tan dachshund, and her friend Zoey came along with Lenny, a chocolate dapple in a harness covered in little sausage dogs. Laura’s hoodie was a deliberate choice. Goose and Gander are helping support this year’s walk, and their Southwold design on the back of the hoodie shows up clearly in the shots of her walking away down the beach. Zoey is the founder of Gym Bunny, a clothing company selling gym and loungewear (you’ll find them on Instagram at @gymbunny__ltd), and she wore her own Gym Bunny kit for the shoot. That gave us a quiet way of putting her business in front of people without turning the walk’s promo into an advert for anyone. Two dogs worked well. One dog on its own can look a bit lost on a big open beach, while two gives you interaction between them and gives the people something to react to other than my camera.
The promo video
The video was always going to be short, about a minute, covering the date, the place and an open invitation to every sausage dog owner to bring their dog along on the 18th. I kept it simple on purpose. A promo reel for a community event is competing with everything else in someone’s feed, and if the date and location aren’t clear in the first few seconds, most people won’t stay for the rest. Shooting video and stills in the same session takes some juggling. The video was the priority, so the stills were worked in around it, and with dogs you don’t get many retakes. A fair amount of both depended on catching whatever Nel and Lenny decided to do next.
Photographing dachshunds on location
Most of the dog shots were taken down at their level, which is where the better pictures are with dachshunds. From standing height you mostly get backs and ears. Lower down you get faces, eyes and a sense of the dog’s character. The dunes helped. The grass gave natural foreground to shoot through and kept the backgrounds soft, and there was enough breeze to lift everyone’s hair, which adds a bit of movement to the frames with people in them. Some of my favourites are the simplest ones, Nel with her nose down in the sand, or Laura and Zoe walking away along the beach with the two dogs trotting between them and the pier in the distance.
About the Southwold Sausage Walk
Laura started the walk in 2018, and it now brings a great many dachshunds and their owners onto Southwold beach. It raises money and awareness for IVDD (intervertebral disc disease), a spinal condition dachshunds are particularly prone to. Event details are on the Southwold Sausage Walk website. I’ll be there on the 18th with my camera, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Pet and promotional photography in Suffolk
My studio is at Base Business Park in Rendlesham, on the former RAF Bentwaters site near Woodbridge, though a good share of my pet and promotional work happens on location like this. I photograph dogs, events and local businesses across Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire, from Ipswich and Woodbridge up the coast to Southwold.
