How passionate are you about dogs? Are you ‘give up my business and take photos of dogs for a living’ passionate?
For many people, owning their own business is the dream – but Sagar Gondalia was dreaming about something else. He knew that owning his medical billing company was smart, but it wasn’t as rewarding as he hoped it would be. Without a plan, he and his business partner sold their company, and Sagar moved into his car, travelling across the country and crashing on friends’ couches.
Throughout his trip, Sagar would take photos of his friends’ dogs, and many of them asked him for prints to hang in their homes. He realized that he had always loved photography, and that there was a market for photos of family pets.
“I realized 10 years ago, all these 30-year-olds were married, and had been married for a while, they had two kids and they paid some professional photographer to take photos of their children, and blow them up, and put them on their walls. There’s no reason they shouldn’t be doing that with their dogs too,” he tells 9News.
Sagar must have quite a nose for business, because his second venture is a success! Known as the “Fodographer”, Sagar has photographed several dogs.
The most rewarding part of his job, he says, is the reaction he gets from the families of the pets he photographs, “I’ve done a number of dogs at the end of their lives and the amount of response I get, when it brings tears to peoples’ eyes when they get portraits of their dogs that really kindle the memories that they’ve had with that animal.”
Visit Sagar’s website or Instagram to see more of his work.
