Je t'aime (1999 - 2014)

I had known Je t'aime ("I love you") from seeing her run in the Solvang Streak for a number of years (she had attended the West Coast Greyhound Gathering every year since it began in 2005). It wasn't until two years ago that I got to the chance to do a session with her in the Secret Garden of the Royal Copenhagen Inn. She was a beautiful brindle girl:

She was twelve at the time. There's something about a Greyhound face grown white with age that's so wonderful.

In April of last year (three months before Katie's amputation) she had a rear leg removed due to OSA and bounced right back.

This year will be the first Solvang gathering where she will not be there. She crossed the bridge on my birthday.

Three months

It's been three months since Katie's death from lymphoma.

I think of her (and of our other two departed greys, Alex and Nikki) every day. And there are many days where I browse through some of the several thousand pictures that I took of her. She was with us for nearly nine years, and even now those thousands of pictures seem inadequate. Oh, most are terrible and not worth sharing with everyone, to be sure, but I saved them.

I cling to these pictures as a way to hang onto her for as long as I can. I won't say that looking at these pictures always brings me comfort — it doesn't. But when it does I go back and think of how well she recovered from her amputation. We were so pleased and happy for her that she gained weight during her chemo treatments because it can cause appetite loss and Katie was never really food-motivated.

I'm rambling now and I can't write a coherent train of thought, so I will leave you with this picture of Katie as she was back in 2008, a couple of months after Nikki had died:

 

I used light coming in through a window to get this. I added +0.7 exposure compensation because I didn't want the light meter to render her in a dull gray. She had this wondering look on her face as Sadie was standing in front of her. Katie's eyes were wonderful and I tried to capture that.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 and the 18-200mm zoom; aperture-priority with aperture set to f/4.8, ISO 1100 at shutter speed of 1/30 second; cloudy-weather white balance; +0.7 exposure compensation; normal JPG.)

Treasure (2001 - 2013)

Another of my Greyhound clients went to the Bridge yesterday: Treasure. I met her at Dewey Beach in 2011. Her owner asked me to get a close-up of her adorable front teeth:

I just saw Treasure and her owner at GIG a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't take any pictures of her then. I've always liked this one particular picture I took of the two of them during our session at Dewey:

I was trying to convey the closeness of their relationship by not only showing them walking together, but by showing their footprints as part of that companionship.

Your mom misses you, Treasure, as do all the people who came to know you.

Molly the Greyhound questions your sanity

 

I used fill-flash to partly fill-in the shadows on the left side of her face, but probably should have turned up the power a little more.

Greyhound head-tilts, like Greyhound ears, amuse me to no end.

Alimony (2001 - 2013)

I only got one chance to meet her -- which was back in 2011 at Dewey. That one visit left me with some wonderful memories of the Mamadog of Sass.

Alimony came from Florida, and after her racing career she was a brood mama to a single litter. My good friend Aimee's husband was browsing photos on Greytalk when he came across this photo:

Photo copyright Jennifer Thomas

(I'm going to venture a guess that he turned into a puddle after seeing this because this is a pretty darn cool picture!)

They made arrangements to have Alimony transported from Florida to Tennessee, then picked her up and drove her further north to their home.

Having known Aimee a few years since I joined Greytalk, I've read the many stories she wrote about Ali. So when she said that she was bringing Alimony, Ali's daughter Flower (who might be the pup in the above picture), Dazzle (who I had met at Dewey when Aimee brought her in 2009), as well as her husband, I was pretty damned excited.

I tried to take a lot of Ali pictures. I doubt she had encountered someone so interested in  photographing her (besides Aimee), so if she was a bit curious (or a bit annoyed) about me I wasn't surprised by this look:

I will always remember her ears (remember, Greyhound ears always amuse me):

I think she just sassed me:

Late Sunday afternoon when we were relaxing on the beach and watching Flower hole-digging, Ali came over to inspect her daughter's progress:

I guess the hole-digging wasn't to Ali's liking ("You're doing it wrong!"), so:

Ali took over digging the hole:

I caught her with this look on her face late Saturday afternoon. I've always looked at this and wondered what she was thinking:

I also tried to get her silhouette during the sunrise:

This is one of my favorite pictures of Ali, along with Dazzle, Flower, and Aimee:

This photo of Aimee and Ali together is Aimee's favorite of all the photos I took of them:

The Mamadog of Sass left a lot of people with a lot of awfully good memories. I know I have some.

On my photo bucket list

One item on my photo bucket list is to get a good picture of Sadie smiling. Now, let me explain: Sadie is sensitive. Sadie thinks she's in trouble when some of us talk loudly in conversation. She thinks this even though the conversation has nothing to do with her. So she will walk or trot up to whoever is doing the loud talking and start smiling and smiling. It's cute to see her do this, but we tell her that she's not in trouble and that things are okay.

So, one day (soon, I hope) I want to get a picture of Sadie smiling. I hope it'll be similar to this picture I took of Pistachio in Solvang a couple of years back:

We're not going to start yelling on purpose at her to try and get this response -- that's just mean. But smiling is part of her personality that I have yet to capture. So getting a picture of her doing this is on my photo bucket list.

What do you have on your photo bucket list?

Hijinks on hold

Sadie's developed a bone spur on her right hind foot, so until we get that sorted out she won't be running or playing around with Katie like this:

I am amazed seeing her facial expressions when she plays.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm VR zoom; shutter-priority mode with shutter speed set to 1/1000 second; camera set aperture at f/4.8 at ISO 2000; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

Some of my favorite photos that I took during 2012

Ava near the Sunken Road in Fredericksburg:

Romeo the galgo in his backyard:

The head of a newly-retired greyhound is cradled by an adoption group volunteer:

Jesse the Chinese crested relaxes during a break from small-dog testing:

A newly-retired greyhound smiles for me:

A greyhounds runs at the Blur of Fur at Gettysburg:

Joey and Ruth at Dewey Beach:

Hailey:

Hoover and Jennifer at Marsh Creek, Gettysburg:

Elvis on his bed:

Amelia is taken for a morning stroll in her wagon at Dewey Beach:

I'm sure I'll think of some others. I'll put those in another post.

Excuse me, pardon me

I was browsing through pictures I had taken during our 2008 family vacation in the Galapagos when I came across our close encounter with a sea lion pup at Puerto Egas on Isla Santiago. We had been up close with California sea lions before this trip: both Gayle and Rachel had volunteered at a marine mammal care center rehabbing injured or ill marine mammals (sea lions and seals) back to health before releasing them back to the wild, and we all got to photograph the mammals in their pens as they recovered. So being close like this was nothing new to us. But seeing them in their natural environment was quite different from visiting them in a concrete pen.

Anyway, we made a wet landing at Puerto Egas and then walked a trail that led to some of the discarded mining equipment and buildings that still remain from the mining days. We walked over lava beds that were interrupted by stretches of gravelly beach to see pups dozing in the warm equatorial sun:

When we crossed one lava bed and stepped onto a gravel beach, our naturalist had us pause because there was a sea lion pup just to the left of our group, lying under the shade of lava flow and just a few feet away. The pup then got up and began walking over in our direction:

But then before it reached it plopped back on the gravel:

We stepped around it so that we wouldn't block its path to the beach. But the pup was in no hurry to leave:

After a few moments it began to move off:

Next to a pool of water it stopped to scratch itself:

When we last saw the pup it was headed towards the beach:

I wonder if this pup is still around.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm VR zoom; program mode; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

Shooting the moon

A friend of mine asked me to write about a few moon photos that appear in one of my Dewey Beach galleries. I'll toss in a couple photos from another gallery and talk a little about them, too. But just know that I have little experience when it comes to photographing the moon.

When I do photograph it oftentimes it's because I want to see how the camera handles the lighting and exposure, and less about being artistic.

Soon after I arrived at Dewey Beach on Thursday evening, another friend there pointed out the moon rising out of the ocean with a few ships crossing on the horizon. So I went out to one of the balconies that faced the beach, set the camera to aperture-priority, the aperture to f/2.8, put a focus point on the moonlit water (because your autofocus needs an edge to focus on), placed the camera on a railing, and fired one shot. This is that first attempt:

Not bad considering it used a shutter speed of 1/8 second at ISO 6400 (as I've said before in an earlier post I'd never consciously use an ISO value that high on my D300). (It looks worse viewed full-size!) I used the default matrix meter setting, which tries to determine what your subject is and, based on that, calculates what the exposure should be. Note the moon (which was nearly full) is way overexposed. In a perfect world, I'd have the camera mounted on a tripod, a cable release to trip the shutter to minimize camera shake, and an viewfinder cover to prevent light from entering the camera through the eyepiece.

As I mentioned above, that picture used aperture-priority exposure mode, mostly because since the subjects in the picture (beach, clouds, ocean, moon) are pretty close to infinity away from me, so I can get away with using a large aperture (f/2.8) to keep the exposure time from getting too long. If you wanted to make it easy, just set your camera to "P" (Program) mode and let the camera figure out the shutter speed and aperture.

On my second try, the moon rose further out from behind the high clouds and became brighter, so the camera picked a shorter shutter speed (1/20 second) while the aperture and the ISO remained the same:

Note that the moonlit water is darker, as is the sky between the horizon and the moon. The moon is still way overexposed but not quite the blob in the first picture.

For the third try, the moon was nearly unobscured by clouds, so the camera shortened the exposure time even more: 1/25 second. Again, the aperture and ISO remained the same:

Just a little bit darker, but now note that the moon looks more like a sphere. This tells you that, if you wanted to photograph the moon only, you'd have to choose a much faster shutter speed to expose it properly than what I used here. But if you intended to include the beach and ocean, all of that would appear darker. Maybe that wasn't your intent.

As a matter of habit I preview the images in the display and adjust my settings accordingly.

Want to see what happens when I let the camera choose everything? I got this:

The camera chose 1/13 second at f/1.8 (wide open on the 50mm lens I was using) at ISO 6400 with -2/3 exposure compensation. Looks okay, but ultimately I had to ask myself: is this the picture I wanted and saw in my mind.

Here's another picture I took of a moonlit scene (this was taken at Academy Bay, Puerto Ayora, Isla Santa Cruz, Galapagos) because I wanted to see what I'd get:

This was in Program mode and matrix-metered using the 18-200mm zoom lens: 1/2 second at f/3.5 at ISO 1000 on our boat, Flamingo I, on which we spent eight days exploring the Galapagos. Again, it looks better this size than full-size.

One last thing: here's what you can get if you spot-meter the moon with a focus point:

In the D600 the spot meter measures the light within a 4mm circle centered on whatever focus point you're using. If I had used matrix-metering here I'm faily sure that the moon would be somewhat overexposed because it would measure the moon's light as well as the area surrounding it. So instead I put a focus point on the moon and opted to spot-meter it, knowing that I would get a faster shutter speed because the spot meter would measure just the moon's light. As a result, the moon is more properly exposed here. (And it did help that I used my Nikon 300mm f/4 telephoto to get a bigger image.)

The next time you get a chance to photograph the moonlit landscape or seascape, just try and take a few pictures and see what you get. Preview your images and adjust accordingly. Have fun!