Let me introduce myself: My name is Alex Cartabio ( you can pronounce my surname by reading these words and letters: "car" "tab" "E" "O" ). My wife Irene and I established and own The Domino Video Company Inc.

We have been involved in showing and breeding Chow Chows for over 30 years. In that time, we have finished over 50 AKC Champions, all owner handled. We typically have around 18 Chows in our kennel. If you'd like to know more about or see our dogs, please visit our Domino Chow Chows Website: ChowChows.com

I started videotaping our own dogs at dog shows in 1986, in order to have records of them for future reference. In 1987, I brought a video camera to the Chow Chow National in Texas and videotaped the entire show. Everyone liked the video and wanted a copy - I looked at it recently and though not that bad, education and years of experience do go a long way. Back then consumer camcorders cost around $1,800 and VCRs about $800 - so there was not much of an audience for dog show videos. By 1990, the prices had dropped significantly to a point where most of all households in the USA had a VCR.

During the late 1980's, I attended NYU Film School ( at night ) and studied video production techniques and technology, in order to improve my skills in a field I really liked. I liked video because while growing up, I had an uncle that recorded home movies on 16mm film, and I was always very drawn to and impressed by how movies could "capture time". As a teenager, I was always handed the camera at family events, and also did "cut and splice" editing of the prints afterwards - it was one of my favorite things to do.

In the early 90's, there were few dog show videographers. I was approached by people that had seen my Chow videos to videotape their National shows. I started videotaping other nationals in 1992 by taking personal time off from my full time job as a Mechanical Engineer.

I worked for a large engineering company in Manhattan ( I worked here: JBB.COM ) and by 1994, with over 30 Nationals booked for 1995, I had to make a choice between the two, and chose to videotape Dog Shows as a full time profession. By the way, Irene is also a mechanical engineer - this is her firm: MGJAssociates.com.

Since then, I've documented hundreds of shows including the Chow Chow National for over 20 continuous years, Airedale Terrier Nationals for over 14 and several others multiple times. At last count, I have videotaped over 65 different breed clubs and have worked for over 100 different AKC clubs of different types. I have done both still photos and videos at the same show and unfortunately, though exhibitors are willing to spend $40 on an 8X10 specialty still photo, I've found that even costing less and being of greater value to serious breeders, videos have never been in high demand.

Computer programming has always been an interest of mine - I studied programming in high school and college. When I started programming in the mid 70's, I worked on a terminal connected to a mainframe that printed to a yellow roll of paper - there were no monitors back then, unless if you worked for NASA!

Our first PC was purchased in 1985 - all our friends wondered why we had or even wanted one. We had to write several applications to keep pedigree and other dog related records, as there were no programs that did this back then ( you can see a pedigree database program I wrote for the web HERE ). We started surfing the web in 1995, when most people we knew did not own a computer, and started designing websites around that time. Many things have changed since then, but I still hand code all these pages and draw all the artwork ( every graphic you see on my websites was drawn from scratch or modified by me ).

We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on video and computer equipment, but this is not important. You can hand a monkey a $70,000 video camera and give him access to the latest in editing stations/servers and he still won't be able to do a professional job. It takes a lot of concentration, experience, talent and dedication to produce good dog show video work.

We hope that in viewing our pages and what we have done, that you'll be of the opinion that we deserve the position we hold as being the foremost dog show videographers in the USA - but that's for YOU to decide!

Thanks for taking the time to learn more about us, for more information on some of our achievements, please visit our MAIN, VIDEO, PHOTO, DV1 WEB DESIGN or CHOW websites by selecting them from the links below.