Meet Your Photographer

Hey everyone!

My name is Marcelo Santana, I just turned 29 and I was born and raised in sunny Southern California! I am the youngest of 5 children with many nieces and nephews. Growing up, I was certainly creative and very imaginative. I would draw things inspired by my favorite computer game in elementary school, RuneScape, and eventually in high school I took animation and Graphic Design classes. Animation taught me a lot of patience and just embracing the process that is art. Art isn’t always the very vibrant and exciting process that we imagine. For me, the most exciting parts of the process are the beginning and end. But I’ll save that for another day. I took what I learned from animation and applied it to my design process. The quickest part of Graphic Design is laying the foundation of the design. Once that’s done, it’s a lot of minor tweaks and changes of the design that take a lot of patience. I received an award for my work in the design class my senior year and went on to study Graphic Design at Orange Coast College for two years.

After two years of junior college and some freelance work, I decided to step away from Graphic Design. As much as I love art, it was apparent that freelance Graphic Design was not for me. Meanwhile I have been working at my local school district helping students and being the support that I felt I needed when I was in school.

In 2016, my childhood dog, Farrah, passed away and I was devastated. After discussing it with my parents, I decided to adopt a puppy the following year. Her name is Kai and she is now 8 years old! Kai is my first dog that is MY dog. My responsibility to feed, train, exercise, etc. Everyone that comes with a dog is now my sole responsibility. When it came to training, I made many mistakes with Kai from ages 3-6. Mistakes that I have seemed help from a few trainers and I eventually went on to work for one of the dog trainers that was able to help me with Kai. I have about 3 years of dog training experience from puppy training all the way to behavior modification with severe aggression. Between working at a desk for the school and doing dog training, both jobs I love, I felt that I was missing my creative outlet. I decided to pick up a camera again and being surrounded by so many dogs every week, it felt natural to start taking photos of all of them. It worked out well because the more training a dog has, the easier it is for me to take some photos of them. Though I pride myself of being able to take photos of any dog with any amount of training.

My mission is ultimately to capture the bond between dogs and their humans. After my first dog passed away, I realized how little photos I had of and with her. This is what inspired me to commemorate the Wild Kinship for others.

I know I left out so much but I will be filling in the gaps in the future. I hope you stick around and I would love to work with you!

Marcelo Santana