These portraits of dogs are wonderfully expressive

They say never work with children or animals but photographer Elke Vogelsang is the exception to the latter.

While Vogelsang's day job mostly involves photographing people, taking shots of her beloved pets is her passion - as these charming portraits show.

"My dogs are the reason I became a professional photographer. They are my inspiration and muses," she told i100.co.uk.

Vogelsang and her husband Carsten live with their three rescue dogs Noodles, Scout and Loli. When her husband fell unconscious in the bath due to a brain hemorrhage a few years ago, it was Noodles and Scout who realised something was wrong and barked to alert Vogelsang.

Vogelsang started a photo diary of the pets while Carsten was recovering in hospital to help aid his short-term memory, and the project grew and grew until she quit her regular job and became a photographer full time.

Dogs are funny characters. They find pleasure in the most mundane things. My dogs are my joy, recreation and constant source of laughter and smiles. They can be shy and sad as well. They comforted me during bad times. I can’t put into words how much they mean to me, so I guess trying to express this in pictures is only natural.

• Elke Vogelsang

Looking for character and emotion in dogs is a very different process to photographing humans, Vogelsang says.

They can seem human-like, but that's just because we are looking for similarities between us and our best friends. "Dogs have a remarkable ability to adapt their lives to fit ours. In my opinion they know far more about us than we about them," she said.

You can see more of her work here and here.

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