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Tonia Shatzel, DVM

When I was seven years old, I received my first camera.  You remember the type: black plastic case with a built-in flash...you had to manually spin the little notched dial at the top several times to ratchet the film forward for the next shot.  My first picture is of my very sleepy parents holding the butterfly candle I had lovingly picked out for them for Christmas.  They look so innocent in that photo...little did they know they had created a monster.  It was 1976, and my parents were barely scraping by.  Canister after canister of film was used to photograph sunsets, pine cones, little brown birds fifty feet away, and, of course, the dog. 

 Photography continued to be a passionate hobby for me through college, veterinary school, and motherhood.  And a hobby is all it has ever been... until now.  

 Enter the Nikon D-90.

Rob, my soulmate, bought me this new camera for our other business  (www.thekingfishway.com), the day before Christmas 2009, with the idea that I would be “the photographer.”  We had done some pretty amazing stuff with our little $100 Kodak digital camera, so we were hopeful this camera could take us to the next level.  We headed to Destin on Christmas day, and I spent the entire drive reading the manual and taking pictures of cows, country diners, road signs, and old cars as we hurtled down the highway.  

 A few days later, armed and ready, we went to Seaside.  It wasn’t planned, we just started taking pictures of everything we could see, but, of course, I was drawn to the dogs.  That night we got home and downloaded SEVEN HUNDRED PICTURES!  I started editing and cropping and a few hours later, I published them to my Facebook, wondering how my friends might respond.  I was pretty impressed with the pictures, and I was thinking:  BOOK!  I titled the album “Dogs of Seaside”, and soon the comments started to pour in, including, again and again:  “You should put these into a book!”

 That was all the encouragement I needed!  The next day I hit the beach again, learning about dog beach permits, what time dogs are allowed on the beach, how to approach people for permission to use photographs, and the limits of my auto-focus in low light.  On day five, we had a routine, taking pictures of people from afar with the zoom lens, hopefully without them realizing what we were doing, then eventually approaching them and asking for permission to use their photos in our book.  Almost everyone was delighted to be a part of our project.  I showed one woman my pictures on my iPhone, and she was very impressed.  “How long have you been doing this?” she asked.  I thought for a moment before I replied, “Well, I guess about three days.”  She looked a little confused.  “Are you a photographer?”  I grinned and replied, “I am now!”