Today is World Galgo Day

Today is World Galgo Day, which was set aside to publicize their situation in Spain. The plight of the galgo (also known as the Spanish Greyhound) in Spain, especially after the end of the hunting season (which happens to be now), is heartbreaking and horrifying. I will not post any pictures here of what happens to all too many of them, but suffice it to say that you can use Google to search and see for yourself. Fortunately there are people and organizations both here in the US (SAGE, GRIN, Scooby North America) and in Europe (Scooby, BaasGalgo, Galgos del Sol, Fundación Benjamín Mehnert) who do their utmost to rescue (and I mean, rescue) them.

What I will do here is to show you some pictures of Galgos that I've met in private photo sessions.

Izaskun:

Romeo:

Tadeo:

Lehto:

Cara:

Adopting a galgo is not quite as hard as you might think.

Thanks to all the volunteers and organizations that help these wonderful dogs.

Cara surveys her domain

The past few weeks I'd been busy getting ready to go as a first-time vendor to the Greyhounds In Gettysburg event in Gettysburg, PA. As a consequence I hadn't been writing much. So I have a lot of catching up to do.

I flew to Baltimore on Wednesday of last week and stayed overnight with greyhound friends of mine. The next day I drove up to Pennsylvania and overnighted with another friend who lives not far from Gettysburg. This particular friend has four dogs (two of them galgos), volunteered for years to move galgos out of Spain, and set up a non-profit to continue rescuing galgos after she moved here from the Netherlands three years ago.

After dinner we spent most of the evening chatting. Soon after her husband excused himself to go to bed, his empty spot on the sofa was soon occupied by her two galgos. Eventually they both fell asleep there, but before they did her white galga, Cara, looked up to see what was going on in the kitchen.

She is a stunning girl. I chose an aperture of f/8 to get as crisp a picture as possible, knowing that in the dim light from the table lamp the shutter speed would be long and the ISO would be high. Fortunately having a VR lens makes getting a picture in lighting situations such as this very easy.

I decided her picture might look better in black-and-white, so after I returned home I imported it into Lightroom to see what I'd get. I just added some underexposure and burned in her tail a bit so it wouldn't disappear in front of her chest.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 105mm VR f/2.8 lens; aperture-priority mode; aperture set to f/8; camera chose shutter speed of 1/20 second at ISO 6400; fluorescent white balance; -0.7 exposure compensation; normal JPG.)

Galgos at Gettysburg

I don't know whether this is true or not, but I got the impression that there were a lot more Galgos at Gettysburg than in years past. There has been a concerted effort by people both here and in Europe to get Galgos out of Spain due to the horrific way that many of them are disposed of when they are no longer wanted.

I won't dwell on that subject as you can find information about that on the internet. Rather I choose to show some Galgos brought to the US and Canada that I met while in Gettysburg. Somewhat smaller than Greyhounds, they are stunning to look at. This is Iker from Canada, who arrived here just a few weeks ago:

He is shy and at first wouldn't let me get too close for a picture. Eventually, he did relent and I got a couple of shots using my 50mm lens.

Zeus was the second Galgo I met. He lives in Ohio:

Then, I met Lehto for the first time. He is nearly a year old and rail-thin. His antics are legendary, as are his looks:

I used an aperture of f/2.8 on all of these, which does not allow much room for focusing errors. But the wide aperture blurs backgrounds nicely.

(Shot with the Nikon D300, 50mm prime, 70-200mm VR zoom, and SB-800 flash; aperture-priority with aperture set to f/2.8; shutter speed varies; ISO 200 and 400; slow-sync flash mode; auto and cloudy white balance; normal JPG.)