All images by Mario Olvera Molinar. Used with permission.
Mario Olvera Molinar is a 25 year old photographer who is here to help make your middle of the week much better. As all of the internet knows and understands, everything is better with puppies.
We discovered Mario on Behance and despite the fact that he hasn’t been really shooting for very long, we know that he is quite capable of producing incredible photos. He’s a man who is passionate about the arts and tells us that he has quite an interesting mind. You see, he sees the world in Sci-Fi scenes and with the eyes of a five year old–and maybe that’s what he had when he photographed a bunch of rambunctious puppies.
Phoblographer: Talk to us about how you got into photography.
Mario: When I was in college I had a class where we used to edit video and learn about Adobe Premiere, but the teacher ask us if two days we could bring our cameras to the class because the photography teacher was going to give us two days of photography class, so I asked my brother if I could use his camera. I remember it was a Canon Rebel XTi. Those two days were enough to fall in love with the lens and the mechanism of the camera. Days after that class I start to search information about photography, composition, light, and every time I got more and more excited. Now these days it is what I love the most, mixed with the beautiful art of manipulating my own pictures, it opens new doors in my head where I find so many cool things.
Phoblographer: What made you want to capture portraits of puppies?
Mario: I have a friend that has an Advertising Agency. He manages the social media of many businesses, so he asked me about a background because he was going to take pictures to puppies, then I thought: “I would love to make puppies portraits, besides it will be a cool challenge.” So I told him that I was going to take the pictures for him and bring my equipment to the store. So I took the opportunity because I wanted to do puppy portraits for my portfolio and this was a good one, and also to help him to deliver better work to the client.
Phoblographer: Puppies (let alone dogs) aren’t exactly the easiest creatures to capture on camera; so how did you go about keeping them calm, composed and ready to photograph?
Mario: Man…the thing is that they weren’t calm at all, just like two were so easy to photograph, the other ones wanted to run, jump and pee in the background–was a mess but a beautiful mess. My friend helped me to put the dogs in the center every time they wanted to leave, we took a lot of shots to actually get a good one, and the focus was the most difficult part of this, they moved a lot! We used food to keep them calm and that worked really well.
Phoblographer: The editing and selection process for this project must have been brutal. What made you specifically choose these images to represent the pups?
Mario: It was! We got a lot of shots and the background was dirty so I had to retouch it a little. About the portrait selection, I took the ones that seemed to be more emotional. When playing with the puppies, you start to know every puppy’s individual personality, so I picked the ones that fit with what the puppies made me feel when I played with them.
Phoblographer: Talk to us about the gear and the setup. You also seem to be using a fairly shallow depth of field. Did that make capturing the dogs on camera even tougher?
Mario: I’ve been using a Canon T3i with a 50mm f1.8 for 90% of all my photography since I started, in this shooting I used the same, 50mm f1.8 with a f/2.0 – 3.0 I don’t remember clearly but it was really opened. I as mentioned earlier, it was really hard to focus because they were moving a lot, and I had to take so much shots to take a good in focus and also in the right place for the lighting to give those smooth shadows.
Phoblographer: So what do you want to do with the project? Please tell us the cutest coffee table book ever…please?
Mario: I want to do an exposition of all the portraits firstly, and what you say about the coffee table book–man, it sounds like a really good idea, I’ll let you now and send you a copy when I make that.