Rudolph The Rednosed Pitbull

When I was a kid, every christmas my dad put up a poster featuring Phil Spector posing as Santa Claus, with sunglasses and all. Very kitch. It originated from the wonderful classic christmas album Phil Spector did with The Ronettes and The Crystals. This christmas he handed me both the vinyl album and the poster, on one condition: I had to put up the poster! He said that as if it was a punishment, but both my girlfriend and I love that poster, since it is so cool, and it reminds me of my childhood.

It was part of what inspired me to shoot Rudolph The Rednosed Reindeer. I wanted to pose as Santa Claus with sunglasses and attitude.

Rednose is a special kind of the American Pit Bull Terrier. Originally being a working dog breed, its fave sport is weight pulling, where a single dog can pull several hundred kilograms on wheels. Very impressive. So, being rednosed, and enjoying to pull, I visualized it would be cool to shoot a rednosed pitbull pulling Santa’s sleigh for a ride.

The rednose breed is illegal in Denmark, so it was almost impossible to find a suitable dog. I ended up using our own wonderful Staffordshire Bull Terrier (called Muffin) who is not a rednose, and is even a she. So Rudolph is a she-male in this instance;-)

Also, I don’t own a sleigh, and contemplated all kinds of options including using a toy sleigh, and enlarging it digitally, but I think the image worked out better without it.

I shot the individual elements one at a time, in our living room, on a white, backlit backdrop, and composited it all together in the end, doing my best to choose individual shots that blended well together.

Merry christmas!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 18:30 and is filed under Portfolio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.