About Mountain Tree Studios
Photographers specializing in pet portraiture and automotive photography, photo-editing and custom graphics. www.mountaintreestudios.com
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Our photography is a collision of passions.
Our main areas of specialty stem from our joint passions in life. As husband and wife, we've been working together for 15 years, so it was fairly inevitable that our individual interests would collide — they happened to do just that, in the medium of photography.
I've loved animals all my life, but looking back, the journey to pet portraiture was really seeded when we were adopted by a stray cat, Daisy. She'd had a perilous past and no-one, even our veterinarian, thought she'd be manageable as a pet, but to give her up would have been to end her life. Our journey, rehabilitating her, brought to our attention the plight of the millions of other homeless animals, but we felt helpless to do a thing.
I had noticed an article in a magazine, talking about how taking beautiful portraits of shelter animals drastically increased their adoption-rate, and a light came on for me — THIS I could do, at least. Since that time, I've had the joy of photographing all sorts of creatures for a range of clients, and helping out animal charities whenever I can.
Joel is a pet-magnet and a calm on-set wrangler! He's just one of those folks to whom animals seem to gravitate, and we thrive when working together, with people's pets, to capture on camera the wonderful personalities and expressions their guardians love!
To our work as photographers, Joel also brought a passion for cars — a quite infectious passion, as it turns out! Joel is a walking automotive encyclopedia and a skilled driver, who truly sees car photography from the perspective and the eyes of the car-lover. He loves to focus on the aspects of a car that make it unique — details to which car owners and enthusiasts relate and that they recognize.
To me, cars are not only fascinating in design, they also always come with a story. From the old and battered daily driver, to the sleek sports car or that truly unique piece of automotive history; they all evoke strong memories for their owners. Cars have personalities, silly as that sounds, and I love to find it and capture that essence on camera.
For both of us, the automobile is a sculptural thing of beauty, and we appreciate the details and design elements which go into their creation. As photographers, we always seek out those details and focus on finding the art within its form.