One of the most amazing emails I’d gotten in awhile was back in 2017 when Michael from Guinness World Records contacted me about photographing a new world record breaker right here in Calgary! I had so much fun on this project, but MAN was it hard to keep it a secret for over SIX MONTHS until the book was released!
About Guinness World Records
“Guinness’ mission is to be the ultimate global authority on record breaking.*” And, they’ve indeed succeeded because let’s face it – does Guinness really need me to tell you what they are about? You already know!
“Guinness researches, measures, documents and authorises the world’s superlatives, from which they create world class products that entertain, inform and inspire people through their unique window on the world.*” And if you’ve ever owned a copy of one of their books, you can confirm this to be true!
Michael’s Brief
The brief was to photograph Toby the Whippet – the record breaker for “Fastest time to pop 100 balloons by a dog“! And lucky me, Toby resides right here in Calgary so I was the dog photographer for the job!
Guinness wanted the session to take place in my studio, so right away there were a few challenges to consider:
Number one, Toby is FAST. I mean, if you have a record for “fastest time to… fill-in-the-blanks” you are fast at something! So, I crossed my fingers that my studio lights could keep up with him! And, they did. YAY!
Number two, we really only had ONE chance to capture the photos. As you can imagine, blowing up balloons is people and time consuming, so we had to grab a series of great shots in a short amount of time. And, we did! WHOOT!
And lastly, Guinness was hoping for some photos of Toby with balloons and Toby becomes CRAZED when he’s around balloons. So, there was no chance that he could be in the same room with them without popping them. So, we shot images of just the balloons alone, and just Toby alone, and the wonderful editors at Guinness used some Photoshop magic to put the shots together (check out the slideshow, above)!
I adored working on this project and Michael from Guinness could not have been nicer! If you don’t have your copy of the Guinness World Records 2019 yet, you can pick one up – just about anywhere that sells books! You can find my image on page 76! Congrats to Toby for your big win!!
If you are a dog business doing good and are looking for some fabulous images, give me a shout! I will be on hiatus until March of 2019, but would love to help you out in the spring!
*Excerpt from the Guinness World Records’ website.
