For my first story email, I found the "perfect" image of a dog resting its chin on a fallen log, looking upward, ears on high alert. I showed the photo to my husband and he said, "Cute!"
I immediately started looking for another photo, even though I was sure just moments earlier that this was the ONE, because I did not want to be cute in any way, not for a story with such deep and astonishing resonance. So I spent an hour or so searching for “dogs in forest” photographs and finally had to stop and pick one because they were all, well, perfect, or almost perfect or perfect for me at that particular moment.
After a while I found the almost perfect image of a dog in the forest with the light just right and not a whole lot of cuteness about it and although I continued to swap out a dozen or maybe a hundred more pictures, I finally ended up with this beauty.
Photo by Monica van der Maden
“When I took this picture in the forest early one morning,” photographer Monica van der Maden said, “Noa [the great Dane] looked at her owner and you could feel the love between them.”
So whether it was love or light, the deep forest or the magnificent dog that convinced me, this is the photo I finally chose for my first story email.
All stories in the story emails or on this website will be paired with an image and I will make every effort to credit the photographer or artist. Thousands of images are freely available on the web from Google Images, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay and other sites and many do not require attribution.
Sometimes I’ll list a story on this website with a different photo than the one I use in the email – that’s what I did this first month, since that “cute” photo is just, well, too darn wonderful. Even after hours of searching, unfortunately, I can’t find the photographer’s name to offer credit. I’ll keep looking.