Hounds of Hamilton: Dogs are the stars at Fetching Studios
We need a big dose of dogs these days so HAMILTON CITY Magazine is a new feature to celebrate the city's canines. Send in your dogs!
This story starts with a photogenic bulldog.
Soon after he moved to Hamilton in 2020, a neighbour who breeds bulldogs asked photographer Geoff Fitzgerald to take photos of a new litter.
“We were grinning ear to ear. It was just so much fun,” says Fitzgerald’s wife Vanessa Marion-Merritt, who helped to corral the scrambling puppies.
Then, in spring 2021, the couple adopted Taffy, one of their neighbour’s dogs. She loves the camera and that’s a good thing because Fitzgerald is constantly taking pictures of her.
“I never knew I was a bulldog person but after having them, I definitely am. I don't think I'm ever going to be anything other than a bulldog person,” says Fitzgerald.
Taffy is basically Miss Piggy. “She’s sweet and cuddly one second and will karate chop you the next and run around like crazy. She's got a big personality.”
After Taffy came Tootsie, her daughter.
“Tootsie is basically Tina Belcher from Bob's Burgers. She’s the awkward daughter. She just sits there and is a little bit more apprehensive, and does weird things. We love her so much. She’s a little bit more on the quiet side, personality wise.”
As the couple walked their Gibson neighbourhood and beyond, they realized that Hamilton is a true dog town.
In January 2022, Fitzgerald and a few friends acquired some studio space in a converted garage at the rear of the Paperbox Studios building on Cumberland Avenue.
Fitzgerald had long had a dream to combine his work in portrait photography with his love of dogs and from all of that, plus some market research that found a booming pet industry and a social media fascination with all things dog, Fetching Studios was born.
“The big thing with Fetching is just patience and cooperation with the dogs,” says Fitzgerald.
“I think it's been sort of trial and error as we've worked with different people and their pets, because everyone has a different dynamic with their dog.”
Fetching has a dog’s person fill out a form to learn about what motivates the pup – usually treats – and if there are any anxiety triggers to avoid like loud noises or flashing lights.
Once the dog is in the studio, they give him or her plenty of time to sniff around and relax.
“We don't get the best work until the last 20 minutes or 15 minutes of our shoot, because that's when the dog, you can see their energy dropping,” says Fitzgerald. “And they become more malleable. They become more adaptable, and listen a little more because they've gotten those zoomies out in that first 15 or 20 minutes. And then they start to sort of cooperate a little bit more.”
The humans have to be comfortable, too, because if they aren’t, the dogs pick up on that, says Marion-Merritt.
“I think a lot of the time people want their pet to perform but we're just here to have fun. We're going to get some bad photos. We're going to get some amazing photos. I think we realized pretty early, the photos that you take away are the product, but the experience is really the value, you know.”
Fitzgerald and Marion-Merritt are big supporters of local rescue organizations, including Save Our Scruff and Ladybird Sanctuary. They support fundraisers by taking photos of pets.
Fitzgerald took a two-year applied photography program and at first, he was shooting there on film. After graduating, he took a job at the Henry’s in Toronto where he got to talk about camera gear all the time. As he started to get more photo work, he shifted to a full-time freelance career.
That was 13 years ago.
“In the early days it was a little bit of a struggle to support my $750 basement apartment. But, you know, I just kept sort of pounding the pavement and networking and working and the business has really developed over the years. I've got a pretty steady stream of clients now.”
Fitzgerald says he continues to be a “gear head.”
“I love the tech side of things, and yeah, and I think with that, I've always been an early adopter of a lot of technology. I got a drone eight years ago, and not a lot of people were shooting drones at the time, right? So eight years later I've got a pretty significant portfolio drone work, and video is a huge part of my business now.”
So Fetching is a culmination of many things – Fitzgerald’s photography, Marion-Merritt’s tech background, the couple’s mutual love of dogs and their desire to launch a business in Hamilton.
Fitzgerald grew up in Paris, Ont. and spent lots of time in the big city of Hamilton as a teenager. Marion-Merritt grew up in St. Catharines and Toronto and has family in Hamilton and Niagara.
The couple moved here after each had spent more than a decade in Toronto in order to realize their goal to buy a house.
“Hamilton was a really good landing point for us, right in the middle of where our families live,” says Marion-Merritt. “It’s affordable, but still an urban centre. We didn't want to go suburban. You know, we're city folks. We loved all the craft breweries and Art Crawl and all the things that were going on. We were really attracted to the identity of the city.”
Fitzgerald says there was really no discussion about what would come after Toronto.
“Hamilton has its own thing going on. If we were leaving Toronto, the only place it was going to be for us was Hamilton.”
WE ARE LAUNCHING HOUNDS OF HAMILTON!
Is there any better escape from the relentless news cycle, doom scrolling and polarizing politics, and any simpler way to find joy and laughter than dogs?
We didn’t think so.
So that’s why we are launching Hounds of Hamilton, our celebration of local dogs in print and online.
Mutts to purebreds, toys to giants, puppies to seniors, Hounds of Hamilton will be the place to find the doggoes in our fair city just waiting for their brush with fame.
We are pairing up with Fetching Studios, the husband and wife team of Geoff Fitzgerald and Vanessa Marion-Merritt, who will help us showcase local canines clients.
But we won’t stop there! We know your phone is jammed with pet photos, so, if you live in Hamilton or Burlington, send your best canine candids to hounds@hamiltoncitymagazine.ca. (To make it into print, please send JPEGS, that are at least 2 MB in file size.)
We can't wait to show you the adorable, joyful and lovable Hounds of Hamilton!
