Many animal shelters have begun enlisting the help of photographers to portray their available pets in a more fun and friendly light, but the ‘Help Dogs with Images’ project goes one step further. Hungarian artist Sarolta Bán transforms typical shelter snapshots into magical scenes with digital additions that seem to magnify each animal’s personality.
Sadly, most shelters don’t have the financial resources or time to take more than a quick picture of each animal, often within their gloomy concrete or wire kennels. These photos do little to help potential human companions envision that dog or cat within their own family.
For the ‘Help Dogs with Images’ project, Bán has asked her over 103,000 Facebook fans to submit photos of dogs, cats or other animals who need homes. She will create a unique digital portrait of each one, and share the image on her Facebook page to help the animal get adopted.
The people who adopt these pets will get a free print of the picture. Says Bán, “Sadly, abandoned dogs have really few chances to appear on a photo that will hep them get out of the shelter – a photo that stands out from the crowd and ‘speaks’ to a person. I would really like to help sheltered animals… a good picture is worth a thousand words.”
The project is now closed to submissions, but you can keep up with it on the Facebook page.