Twenty years and a month...

...since we adopted our first retired greyhound, Alex (racing name Sanja Blackeyes).

(He came from Oklahoma; his breeder was James Hicks.)

Twenty years? I can't believe it either.

That special "thing"

Would it be safe to say that there is some "thing" that every greyhound has? That one "thing" the greyhound has which remains in your memory and neither dims nor diminish over time? For me, with Alex, our first greyhound, it was his black eyebrows; with Nikki, it was her stand-up ears and her happy personality (oops, that's two things). With our current greyhounds-in-residence Sadie, it's her stalking me (among her many quirks), and with Katie, it's play-snapping.

With one friend's greyhound, the special "thing" about her to me was this white marking:

When I first met my friend and her greyhound at Dewey Beach in October 2009 we were both part of a group of East coast and Midwest greyhound friends renting a vacation house at Dewey Beach. After she introduced her greyhound, Neyla, to me I could not help but notice this white, triangular marking atop Neyla's neck. I tried to get some pictures of it. I was particularly pleased at a few pictures I got of her expressions while she was pawing at a gift I received during a gift exchange we did. She got really excited over opening gifts, I was told.

I took this photo as our group went out for a morning walk on the beach. I used a long focal length to shorten the depth of field and blur the background as I focused on the marking.

We all met again at Dewey in October of the following year. Neyla and I were re-introduced. I tried to take a lot of pictures of her during that weekend. When I left Dewey my last glimpse of her was through the rear window of the car I was riding in as we drove to the airport.

That would be the last time I saw Neyla: diagnosed with osteo earlier in 2010 she was gone two months after I took the photo. As a gift of condolence to our friend we had a large canvas print made of this picture with an appropriate quotation from Mahatma Gandhi that Aimee found.

Miss you, Neyla: you were one special pup.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom set at 170mm; program-mode; camera chose 1/400 at f/10; ISO 200; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

Nikki, our second greyhound

When we decided to get Alex, our first greyhound, a dog, we adopted Nikki in 1997. She came from Oklahoma via the Caliente racetrack, and became the perfect companion for Alex. After Alex died in 2003 she was depressed for months until we got Sadie later that year.

 

Oftentimes when I photograph outdoors I will use flash (often an external Nikon SB-400 or SB-800 flash) to fill in shadows. "Fill" is sometimes not an accurate description when referring to fill flash: for me, fill flash is a matter of trying to balance the ambient light (the outdoor light, in this case) and how dark the shadows are. I don't mean to use flash to fill in any shadows completely -- I just want to make the shadows less dark. (I'll talk about how to adjust the flash compensation in another post.)

But in this case, when Nikki was standing on our front lawn one late afternoon I liked how light was falling from her left (or camera right, if you prefer) while the vine-covered wall behind her was in shadow. I positioned myself so that her head was in front of the dark wall and quickly took three photos. I was happiest with this image (the first). I used no fill flash at all in this instance: light reflected from the house to my left provided some fill. With the dark background I was able to capture the shape and texture of her ears (which she often stood up like this), as well as her illuminated left eye.

She was a good, good and happy dog. We miss her.

(Shot with the Nikon D200, 18-200mm zoom at 50mm, 1/180sec at f/7.1, ISO 100, program mode, matrix-metered, auto white balance.)

Introduction

I have loved photography for most of my life. I photograph anything that catches my eye. Anyway, for the last fifteen years or so my photography has centered on our retired racing greyhounds. So in this blog I'll post pictures that I've taken of them, of other greyhounds, of other dogs, and of many other things, and share the who-what-when-where-and-why about each picture.

But, about our first greyhound...

We adopted our first retired racing greyhound, Alex, in the fall of 1993. He was four years old at the time, so he'd been racing for a few years. We don't know how many races he ran, nor do we know what tracks he raced on (other than the last track), but we do know he was born in Oklahoma and finished racing at the Caliente racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico.

He was a striking white greyhound with black "ticking" (spots) over his entire body, and a thick black eyebrow over each eye. He was part of a group of dogs named after classical music composers by the adoption group: he was named Amadeus. But he was also nicknamed Groucho because of his eyebrows. Alex was with us for nearly ten years. But even ten years was not enough time spent with him. Though he's been gone for nearly eight years, I think of him still.

This picture of Alex is from a scanned print. I think this was taken with my Nikon N70 film SLR, using Kodacolor print film. The sky was overcast so there isn't much in the way of shadows. You can see that he's overexposed; white greyhounds are somewhat harder to photograph well than are greyhounds of other colors. As time went on I would underexpose so as not to blow out his highlights.