The Labs & Co.

04/13/2026

Whatever is going on around you, please don’t lose sight of what the point of it all is in the end.

Love, in all its shapes and forms.

Considering bringing back our Story Sessions for the season, if it’s something you’ve been thinking about, this is the sign you were waiting for to make it happen.
📧

03/28/2026

Model Network friends, check your emails! Casting details are out. We’ve already had a great response for this shoot, but I want to make sure everyone is able to receive their casting call emails.
If you didn’t receive them, please check your spam folders and do let me know if you don’t see yours.

Casting call details are only shared with our model network members. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to join us, make sure you read through the details and sign up!

*as a reminder, we are not a talent agency and these casting calls are only for our photo and video productions.

03/19/2026

We are slow rolling into new upcoming projects for spring (Northern California). We are preparing for two projects featuring toys for dogs and cats and we’ll be casting for those soon!

Model Network, check your emails to make sure we are not getting lost in your junk folder 🥴. More details to come, but get your calendar out for the first weeks of April!

Want to join our Model Network and take part in our phot and video productions? Make sure you sign up via the link in our profile or visit thelabsand.co/model-network for more information on it.

**please note, we are not a talent agency, our Model Network is a group dedicated to our own photo and video productions for brands and passion projects.

01/03/2026

We wanted to say Thank You to everyone we love and worked with last year. Everyone who held us and supported us through a very difficult time, with our Willow rejoining the stars. To convey our wishes for this year to be everything you need and hope it to be. So…

We made you a mixtape. Sort of. It goes beyond music and pretty photos on a calendar featuring our beloved muse, Willow. These are 12 (ok 13) of our favorite photographs we ever made together. Her Greatest Hits, if you will. They won no awards and many never got published until now; but they are as treasured as the songs that accompany them.

Each month features a song that either inspired the image in the first place, or evokes the feeling of it. We also added a favorite lyric from each song.

Like any good mixtape, it is eclectic and put together with so much thought and care. It is our Thank You to you all, who continue to love our Goodest Girl. Thank you for all your love and support, now and always.

Scan the QR code on the cover to go directly to Willow’s Mixtape (ahem… playlist for those not familiar with cassette tapes). We hope you enjoy this as much as we enjoyed creating it for you, in honor of our Willow the Wild.

Get yours here:

So… We made you a mixtape. It goes beyond music and pretty photos on a calendar featuring our beloved muse, Willow. These are 12 (ok 13) of our favorite photographs we ever made together. Her Greatest Hits, if you will. They won no awards and many never got published until now; but they are as [.....

11/01/2025

And so, our Halloween series comes to its grand finale tonight as our goodest girl takes a bow. Thank you all for 13 years of Halloween magic. I really hope you'll head to the blog and read about this, Our Elders' Campfire Stories.

Read it HERE: https://thelabsand.co/campfire-stories/

Have a safe and sweet Halloween, friends. We love and thank you all 🎃👻🐺

10/30/2025

Our Willow the Wild | 2012 -2025
Our Canis Luna forever.

Dear friends, we have been quiet here the last few weeks. We feel a little (a lot) lost without the giant heart of our home. Our most beloved lady, our Willow the Wild, peacefully rejoined the stars on October 16th.

She is lighting up our night sky together again with her brothers Corbin and Artemis, along with so many dearly missed old friends.

We have a lot to say about her, a lot to celebrate about her life and work (because that girl did some INCREDIBLE work) and we feel her story is worth taking the time to write faithfully and full of heart… and our heart is pretty broken since her departure.

We’ll be sharing some of our favorite projects we created together, beginning with our favorite legacy of hers, our yearly Halloween project that spanned the whole of her 13 years on earth.

Thank you for your understanding of our silence and absence. Thank you for your patience in our delay to reply or deliver. We are doing our best to remember how to breathe in the same space we shared with our goodest girl that now feels devoid of music and magic.

So much more to come. She deserves nothing short of our very best tribute. I’ll make sure of it.

My Canis Luna, I’m so grateful for every bit of your stardust. I miss you so terribly. I love you fiercely and forever.

I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing You.

09/17/2025

Around here, we honor the dogs that have changed the game for us, guiding us through life like a ship navigating by the stars.
We give them a title of honor: Canis Major 🌌

To continue celebrating our Leeloo kitty’s 21st birthday however, I wanted to enlist your help in figuring out a feline version of this honor title. Because cats have their own intense magic and medicine. Anyone lucky to have been loved by one knows this. What could it be? Felis Maximus?

Our Canis Major Corbin, the Lab that started it all, photographed with Leeloo. These two were at the beginning of it all. 💗

09/03/2025

🥰 Honored to have our Corbin, Willow and Kowi as members of the P.L.A.Y. family.

04/22/2025

Our working style for both brands and commissions it’s not just about great models with a genuine connection—little tricks with tech, composition, a killer location and waiting for the perfect light to hit that window takes everything to another level, and when some things cannot be avoided, you compensate elsewhere.
In this case, we had a very strict color palette we were trying to adhere to, one that specified avoiding colors outside or directly opposite of that palette. Black was one of those colors, so we worked hard to try and avoid the checkered floor—however, the kitchen was so perfect at this particular time and that sun was starting to hit the window just above our models just right. So we compensated, by bringing in a mat that was within the requested colors, we warmed the temp up a bit to soften those black checkered floors and I angled the camera to allow for a tiny kiss of flare because I was armed with my favorite diffusion filter for our lenses.

It’s funny, because Bill and I work seamlessly as a team, but we each have our unique preferences. He loves the 24-70 lens, and don’t. He is reserved and selective of when to use this diffusion lens filter, and I’ll use it any chance I get because I love what it does to the light.
He initially hesitated when he saw me reach for it, but once he and Nic saw this image on she screen, they both said: “Yep. Perfect.”

When you work with a team, you will come to differ on opinions. If you truly believe what you suggest will work for the shot, don’t be afraid to push for it (in a kind way) and where possible, SHOW them what you mean. It may go your way, it may not. Remember that commercial projects only work with communication and working together for a common goal.

04/16/2025

Next up in our case study series is our model team of Reno and Heather.

We knew we would be working with a bath scene for this shoot, so our dog models for the day had to be comfortable in a tub and simulated bath (no water in the tub) and for one, an actual bath. This shot took place outside, where our art director Nic had spotted this great bathtub. It was earlier in the day still, but the temperature was steadily rising and the sun was starting to get a little bright—it was actually starting to beat down on our models from above and behind the tub.

To soften the light and bring down the temperature to protect our models from the heat, I held a diffuser just above them and Bill tightened the crop a bit.

Reno is such an easy going soul, and with long Basset ears, very used to ear washes. With the heat of the day, I think he actually enjoyed parts of his simulated bath scene and getting sprinkled with water to cool off.

The rest of our shots with Heather and Reno would take place inside the house, in the blissful comfort of air conditioning. The home itself did not have AC. We brought our own portable one to the shoot, anticipating a very hot day. It’s little things like this that make a BIG difference in the comfort of your team and talent, and when working with animals, their safety and comfort is at the very top of our priority list.

04/13/2025

Katie and her dogs have been a part of our Model Network for nearly 13 years. We have seen her three dogs grow from full bellied puppies into incredibly talented and beautifully trained adult dogs.
When you work on so many projects together for so long, you build a lot of trust.

Katie knows her dogs are in good hands and guaranteed to have a good time at our shoots. She knows she can trust us with the individual needs of her dogs and that we are there to advocate for them. Likewise, we know Katie and her dogs will deliver any and all the trained behaviors, both cued and spontaneous, that our client and project needs. Not only that, we know that anytime Katie is on the call sheet, the set will be a very fun place to work.

Bailey (our Lanana Creek client) and Nic, our art director, had such a good time watching Katie cue Lark to do anything they could dream of for the photos and video. One of my favorite parts about working with Katie is the reciprocity of asking “do you think Lark would be willing/able to do X behavior?” and Katie replying always honestly, whether it’s a “sure”, “maybe”, “not likely” or “let’s try it!”

Being fun and easy to work with is a key ingredient for us when we cast our models. We not only look out for our clients and the home/location we work in. One of our top priorities is that our models (the dogs especially) have a blast working our shoots, because that’s the real magic right there.
We can have the perfect environment, lighting, product and client. But the dogs themselves bring the work to life. ✨

At the end of every model’s session, we take a few minutes before the next team arrives to take a few portraits. This is a favorite tradition of ours, and for models like Katie, who have worked with us for so long, they have a whole book of portraits from countless projects. 💗

04/12/2025

The Lanana Creek project was one of our largest ones last year. It was a multifaceted launch from an established brand and family owned business taking its first steps and releasing a line of products made especially for dogs.
The brand was in good hands with Nic’s careful art direction and therefore, the prop styling was very strict in terms of use of color and texture. You may notice lots of warmth in these images, and that’s according to plan.

This project was extra special, since we also got to work on the packaging alongside Nic. She brought me in to create botanical illustrations for each product and to flush out the label designs once initial art direction was established.

Putting together this full day shoot with many preproduction days during a very hot summer was no picnic. But I felt like one (with AC thank goodness 😅 ) because of the team surrounding us. With Nic and Amy, we are close as family type friends who happen to work really well together. And having Bailey, the head of Lanana Creek Farms, present at the shoot and so willing to trust us all with his brand and being a wealth of information about his products was as good as it gets for commercial work that feels nothing like “work.”

Lark and Katie were our first model team of the day. Having worked together for many years and on many shoots, we knew we wanted to kick off the shoot day with an Ace. I still get a kick out of remembering how starry-eyed Bailey and Nic were when we showed them what Lark and Katie could do. Simple, beautiful training skills and communication that can take images to another level. But more on that in the next post. 🧡