I got my first dog when I was seventeen.

I'd been sick for months, at home and mostly off my feet, while my friends were at school living normal teenage lives. Her name was Flee. She was a Kelpie cross, black, with dark eyes and absolutely no interest in letting me feel sorry for myself.

She was the reason I got up. As I got stronger, Flee did too. Together we increased our walks, but we never decreased our cuddles.

I didn't know then that she'd still be with me sixteen and a half years later. That she'd curl up in the back seat of my old Corolla, in the safe spot she'd claimed as hers, while I drove across Australia with a tent and not much else. That she'd move to Italy with me and my husband Marco, hike to 3000 metres in the Alps at fourteen, and spend her final years wandering through European villages like she owned them.

My familiar. So far from home.

She died in France last June.

How Flee made me a photographer

Before I was a dog photographer, I was working in a newborn and wedding studio. My boss was generous enough to let me borrow his camera, and I'd take it home and photograph Flee.

I'd bring the images in the next morning and ask for feedback. He'd look through them, make suggestions, and I'd go home and do it again.

After a few months of this, he sat me down. He'd noticed that the only thing I truly loved photographing was her. The images showed it. He decided the studio would offer pet photography, and I was to shoot it. That was that.

Flee was black with dark eyes, a technically demanding subject that most photographers dread. I learned to read light and expression and timing in the hardest possible school. In hindsight, there was no better teacher.

I eventually moved to Adelaide, started my own business around 2012, and very quickly stopped offering anything other than dogs. Not because I couldn't photograph other things. Because nothing else came close to mattering as much.

Over the years, as people learned what I do, I've lost count of those who've told me they wished they'd known pet photography was a thing. I've watched people light up at images of their dogs that captured something true, a look, a habit, a moment so perfectly them that it makes you laugh out loud. And I've sat with people who are grieving, watching them hold a photograph the way you hold something you can't afford to lose. I understood all of it. Because I was living it too, right alongside them.

What I learned from losing her

Flee's decline was gradual, and then suddenly it wasn't. Her organs began to fail. She lost control of her back legs. She could barely breathe. And then she ignored the frozen watermelon, which for a dog who carried more than a little Labrador in her was the moment I knew. She had always been food-obsessed. When she stopped caring, I understood it was time to stop waiting for nature to take its course. It would have been cruel to do otherwise.

Marco called the vet in his broken French. We made the appointment, and the next morning we took her in. The vet was kind. The goodbye was peaceful. And just like that, she was gone.

I'd always known photographs would matter when this moment came. That's why I'd taken so many. What I hadn't anticipated was just how much they'd shape the days that followed. We moved back to Australia a few months later with just 90kg of luggage between us. After six years overseas, that's all we brought. Her album was in it.

The first thing I ordered for our new home was a canvas of the four of us. I'd commissioned a Swiss photographer, one of the best I know, to travel to us in the Italian Alps where we were living at the time. It wasn't a small investment, but I knew exactly what I was paying for. She spent a full day with us, not shooting, just being there while we did what we loved. The images she made that day are some of the most important things I own. One of them hangs in our living room now. She's still there every morning.

*Our family photo, hanging in our living room*

Why senior dogs, and why the human matters too

Every dog owner knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the time will come. We just try not to think about it until we have to.

Senior dogs are different to photograph. They're not performing for you. They're not bouncing off the walls or trying to eat the camera. They're just completely, unapologetically themselves. There's a stillness to them that I find extraordinary, and a particular kind of beauty that I don't think gets celebrated nearly enough.

But I've also learned something else. In the weeks before we lost Flee, when I could see the time was getting close, I handed Marco my camera with the settings already dialled in and asked him to photograph us together. Just us. Those last walks. Those quiet mornings. I wanted to remember what it felt like to have her close, not just what she looked like.

My favourite of those images is printed on handmade paper and framed simply. I had it done at Australia's oldest photo lab, in Adelaide. It hangs in our hallway. A year on, it's still one of the first things I see every day.

I also have the hiking photo. Proof that at fourteen years old, she climbed to 3000 metres and didn't complain once. I love that one because it reminds me she wasn't always old. That she was once a dog who climbed mountains well beyond her youth.

Both matter. The dog in their prime, and the dog in their last chapter. The dog alone, and the dog with the person who loves them most.

That's what I try to give people. Not just a portrait of their dog, but a record of the two of them together, at this moment in time, before it changes.

Because one day, these photos will be everything. I know.

About Classico Portraits

Classico Portraits is a portrait studio based on the Mornington Peninsula, specialising in dog photography. We offer slow, extended sessions designed around your dog's personality, at the beach, on the couch, on a walk, wherever they're happiest. Our clients typically display their portraits as wall art, keepsake boxes, or collector books.

If you have a senior dog and you'd like to talk about creating something lasting, we'd love to hear from you.

Hi, I’m Kirstie

Specialist pet photographer

I'm the founder of Classico Portraits Australia. I grew up in the horse paddock, which is where my understanding of animals began long before I ever picked up a camera.

I've spent fifteen years working alongside vet behaviourists, fear-free groomers, and thousands of dogs across Australia and Italy. I notice the lean away, the slow blink, the whale eye.

That's what I've built this studio around.

Flee taught me the rest.

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The Dog Who Started It All, and Why I Photograph Senior Dogs