Sadie and Katie in the Summer 2011 issue of Celebrating Greyhounds magazine

After an anxious week of waiting, my summer 2011 issue of Celebrating Greyhounds (published by The Greyhound Project) arrived yesterday afternoon. Why? Because an article that I had finally submitted (sorry, Cindy) to the magazine about our trip to Yellowstone National Park with Sadie and Katie was published.

It came out wonderfully. Woo hoo! Here are a couple of pictures that were in the article:

Thanks go to Cindy Hanson, editor of Celebrating Greyhounds magazine, the staff at CG, and the Adopt-a-Greyhound organization.

Seeing the shapes of things

I sometimes try to see geometric shapes when I photograph. Sometimes it's trying to see how the shape of a subject affects the shape of its surroundings. I guess that would be trying to see the negative space in my viewfinder and not the subject.

So what does this have to do with greyhounds? Well, late one afternoon, when Sadie, Katie, and I stepped out of our West Yellowstone hotel room, there was a shaft of light coming through a side exit glass door and slanting down the hallway. You know how greyhounds are sometimes called "needle-noses" when you view their heads in profile or full-face? With Sadie standing in the hallway, that shaft of light sort of mimicked her profile.

So I thought I'd try and capture Sadie's silhouette within the shaft. But if I put her in the center of the viewfinder, the light meter would expose her correctly but the wall behind her would be way overexposed. So what I did was use the "AE-L/AF-L" button that's just to the right of the eyepiece. The default setting for this button is that it'll lock the exposure AND the focus on your subject. But I changed the button's function (it's custom function "f6" on the D300) so that the button would only lock the exposure when pressed and not the focus. (I find myself in those sorts of situations more often than needing to lock focus.)

Anyway, I aimed the camera at the wall behind Sadie, metered the wall, then pressed the "AE-L/AF-L" button down with my thumb to keep those exposure values, then focused on Sadie's profile to take the picture. I don't think I got the shapes exactly as I had pictured them in my mind, but it was fun trying to see if I could.

(Shot with the Nikon D300; 18-200mm zoom set at 27mm; aperture-priority; 1/400 sec @ f/5.6; ISO 200; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

Why you don't take your greyhounds to Yellowstone...

...because they don't care about geysers.

(Shot with the Nikon D300; 18-200mm zoom set to 18mm; program mode chose 1/320 sec @ f/9.0; ISO 200; cloudy white balance; normal JPG.)