ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
Picture this: you’re face-to-face with a bird-eating spider the size of your hand. The room is tiny, it’s hot, and you have to get as close as you can because it’s your job to capture every inch of the little guy’s personality with your camera while his owner breathes down your neck. Sound like the stuff of nightmares? It’s just another day in the office for Perth-based pet photographer Alex Cearns OAM.
Today, Cearns’s successful pet portrait business, Houndstooth Studio, stands as one of Australia’s most wellrespected, and she has won hundreds of awards for her photography from all over the world. It is remarkable because photography isn’t her first career and is something she only began taking seriously just 14 years ago.
“It was my interest in animals that came first, well before the photography,” she explains, speaking down the line during a rare break from shooting at the studio. “I’m an only child and I grew up around animals my whole life. In many ways they were my first friends.”
And although a lifelong love of animals would later become key to her work, it’s also a world away from where she started out – 14 years with Western Australia Police, and five years with the
