I had been walking around with this idea in my head for the past fifteen years or so, ever since my Tom Arma's Please

Save the Animals® series became popular. I wanted to somehow blend my love of wild creatures with the fun I have

capturing the unfettered expressions of the very young of my own species. But how to bring together, visually, the

facination that these two worlds hold for me? To take the step from "taking" pictures, to "making" them was my answer.

Before each costume is designed, I do extensive research on the animal. The costumes are then constructed.

I hold a casting call where I may see up to 500 babies for a single costume. When I find the perfect baby,

the fun begins. The baby comes to my studio with mom, dad, or grandparents and I photograph him or her in the

costume. The whole "shoot" lasts perhaps ten minutes.

To create a "Safari" picture I begin by choosing the baby aninmal photo I want to work with. Researching

the animals environment, I may choose just one or as many as twenty-five image elements to create the particular

scene for the baby animal.

I use a graphics tablic for my canvas. I may alter perspective of certain elements, and then I blend them

all together so that light, color, and hue are just as your eye might percieve them in real life. Except, by design,

my images are hyper-real-closer to a form of the photorealism form of art. Each picture can take weeks of

experimentation to get it just the way I want it. It is all in the details, the ones you don't see.

On a more technical note , these are high resolution .tiff image files which are saved in CMYK . The square images are

about 250 megabytes, the horizontal images ,are considerably larger.