One creative project a month “purely for the fun of it.” That’s the promise corporate photographer Kellie Warren made to herself in January 2024. The result was her series “It’s Raining Dogs.”
The series was sparked by Warren’s desire to combine her photography skills with her drawing skills. Her original idea was to photograph a well-dressed man with an umbrella and then hand-draw raindrops onto the image. But when she began mining for models in Facebook groups and on Model Mayhem, she came across Danielle Christine Blasingame, who trains dogs to participate in photo sessions. “I love dogs, so I wanted to incorporate them somehow into my shoot, and then I changed the idea to ‘It’s Raining Dogs,’” Warren explains.
“The project gave me a chance to collaborate with other folks who wanted to create something fun,” she says. She showed her ideas and sketches to Blasingame, the dogs’ handlers, and the models, and everyone was on board. “No matter what I asked her to have the dogs do, they did,” says Warren. “It definitely took a lot of coordination between all of us to get the looks we wanted out of the dogs and the models at the same time. But that was the fun part.”
The fun was the point. “We all get so caught up in doing the jobs people are paying us to do,” Warren says. But diving into a creative idea, no matter how out of the box it is, and just doing it, is also important. “You’ve got to make the time to play.”
Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.
