Meet the people helping metro Atlanta shelter dogs put their best paw forward
Diego Rodriguez’s work uniform as a photographer consists of knee pads, a camera and a lanyard strung with animal call whistles. He rotates between a duck, a crow and even a squirrel.
Rodriguez’s subject, Bernie, locks eyes with him when he blows that duck call. Rodriguez snaps a picture, the flash lighting up Bernie’s dark eyes. The photo highlights each curl and tendril of Bernie’s white hair, and he is quickly guided back into Wag-A-Lot doggy daycare where he’ll rejoin his other canine friends.
Rodriguez has never been a fan of photographing people.
“Humans have a different perspective of what they look like in a photo,” he said.
Dogs, on the other hand, don’t usually object to their appearance.
Diego Rodriguez is a pet photographer, and while he spends many days taking glamour shots of dogs and cats, his passion lies in photographing shelter animals to give them a fair shot at finding a family.
He’s not the only one using his talents to showcase shelter dogs in a better light. Several weeks ago, Buford resident Katie Ceraso launched an Instagram project to highlight one shelter dog a day until she hits 100,000 followers. So far, she’s gotten more than 16,000 followers and 17 of the dogs featured in her videos have been adopted.
The life of a dog photographer
Rodriguez has been photographing dogs for about 12 years. He took his first gig while still in school in Colombia at a Kennel Club, an organization that manages purebred dog breeding, but he wanted to shift his attention toward animals who needed help. He set up his photography operations in Atlanta in 2020.
Photographing shelter dogs and people’s pets has created many opportunities for him, he said, including a recent advertising campaign for dog soccer jerseys. He hopes to one day make pet photography his full-time job, but in the meantime he also works at a bar in Alpharetta.
As the weather gets nicer, he said he’s booked basically every weekend photographing a family pet or taking pictures at breweries and other venues.
He’s seen businesses become friendlier toward dogs, implementing pet-friendly areas and encouraging patrons to bring their pups.
Pet adoptions and spending grew in 2020 and 2021, and spending continues to rise each year, according to Capital One shopping data, though higher prices for dog food and vet bills are beginning to slow this surge in spending.
Photographing dogs comes with its own set of challenges, namely that it’s harder to get their attention. That’s when Rodriguez’s noisemakers come into play, and the strange sounds often elicit a dog’s signature head tilt.
While he often stays busy with doting dog parents and brands, that side of the business enables him to work with shelters for free. He partners with social media nonprofit RescueMeATL to connect with shelters that need his photo skills.
“What I do is try to show a little bit of a better image of the same dog with a different perspective,” Rodriguez said.
Creating content for social media feels necessary in this line of work, Rodriguez said, even if that was never his goal. Without it, many of the dogs would never be noticed. Rodriguez uses the photos and videos to share the dogs’ stories, and what it means if they don’t find a home.
“It’s unfortunately a reality that we have to deal with, and the fact that I post it or not, it’s not going to make it go away,” he said.
Why telling a dog’s story matters
Macadamia, a 3.5-year-old corgi mix, was timid and fearful in the shelter — she cowered in her kennel and certainly didn’t seem open to playing. But Ceraso knew the dog would make a wonderful companion if she just had a chance to blossom outside of the noise and stresses of a shelter.
About two weeks ago, Ceraso took Macadamia home for the evening and took a video of her playing with her other dogs, which she posted on Instagram. The video reached 22-year-old Andrea Range hundreds of miles away from Macadamia’s home shelter in Thomasville, Georgia.
“I saw her and was like, ‘Yep, this is my best friend,’” Range said. She ended up driving from Tennessee to pick up her dog.
Ceraso had already been posting dogs since 2017 before coming up with the goal of posting a shelter dog a day until she reaches 100,000 followers. After seeing how oversaturated social media is with animal content, Ceraso thought an ambitious series like this would help the shelter dogs stand out. Since July 8, she’s featured more than 45 unique dogs.
When she isn’t playing catch with shelter dogs, Ceraso works as the statewide programs director for the Humane Society for Greater Savannah. Since much of the work is done remotely, she wanted to find a way to interact with shelter dogs more on a daily basis.
“I’ve been doing this work for 10 years, and I think I’ve just kind of gotten to the point where I feel a little stagnant, and I just needed something else to kind of rejuvenate me,” she said on a recent weekday in the back office of Toccoa-Stephens County Humane Shelter.
That was about an hour drive from her home in Buford, but these days, an hour is nothing when she’s fielding requests from shelters around Georgia, including one in Albany.
She’s seen how vital social media is for rural shelters that don’t see much foot traffic. Toccoa’s shelter is located down winding back roads “next to a dump and a jail,” executive director Rylee Mercer said. When Mercer came across Ceraso’s social media account, she reached out about featuring some of Toccoa’s shelter dogs.
Mercer’s shelter has a small staff, and there’s no one dedicated to promoting the dogs on social media. Meanwhile, the number of animals getting dropped off at the shelter is only rising.
In 2025, more than 2,000 cats and dogs entered the Toccoa-Stephens County Humane Shelter, about a 33% increase from 2024, according to the shelter’s data. Ceraso, who has worked in the industry for a decade, said it’s becoming harder for her to find placements for dogs with rescues and in foster homes.
Ceraso and Mercer attribute this to a challenging economy and expensive dog food and vet bills, and some pet owners who can no longer afford to care for their dogs.
To combat this, Mercer’s shelter gives out free pet food when possible, and Ceraso works to spread the word about the many adoptable pups available around the state.
There’s a saying in the industry, Ceraso said: “Seen equals saved.”
But the stories don’t always have such immediate and positive outcomes as with Macadamia.
“There’s a very fine line that we walk in doing this work in guilting people, and being realistic,” she said. “I’m not confident that I’ve even found it yet or ever will in being able to tell their stories and be transparent about the urgency versus making people feel bad and guilting them into taking a dog.”
She struggles with whether she should highlight dogs who don’t have a great chance of getting adopted or who are on the euthanasia list. If they don’t find a home, she might have to share the news with the audience, even though that’s the reality of overcrowded shelters.
On Ceraso’s recent visit to the Toccoa shelter, Mercer gave her a rundown on some of the pups facing the most challenges getting adopted. That included Milk Man, an energetic 2-year-old pit bull terrier with an affinity for chasing balls, and Biscuit, a leggy 9-year-old Doberman Ceraso already posted about early on in her journey.
On this occasion, Ceraso played with Biscuit in the yard for a bit, her fanny pack stuffed with treats and three squeaky toys. While most of her videos aim to highlight the dog’s personality by showing them playing outside or cuddling, this time she wanted to take Biscuit out into the world. She loaded him into her car and took him on a field trip to Chick-fil-A for a vanilla ice cream cone he enthusiastically devoured.
Since posting Biscuit’s video a few days ago, it has reached over 10,000 views on Instagram with 74 comments. At the time of publication, he was still waiting in the shelter.
Ceraso began this project not to become famous, but to make sure the dogs she shared would find visibility across county and state lines. She plans to keep posting daily until she hits 100,000 followers but hasn’t decided what will come after that. While it’s not always guaranteed to succeed, sometimes it means a dog like Macadamia will find a home.
“It gives them more of a fighting chance,” Range said.