Charlie

Charlie is a greyhound who, if I remember correctly, is relatively new to the beach. During my session with him at Dewey we tried to get him close to the water and see if, perhaps, he might play in the surf.

Ummm...not so much:

He was a little suspicious of moving water and foam. But he didn't try running away, either.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom set at 60mm; shutter-priority with shutter speed set at 1/500 second; camera chose aperture of f/13 at ISO 200; slow-sync; SB-800 used for fill; matrix-metered; auto white balance; shot in RAW.)

Abbey

A tip often cited by pro pet photographers to get interesting pictures of dogs is to get down to the dog's eye level. I agree. This is because most pet photos are taken looking down at the pet. And you'd like to take a picture with the idea of "this is what I see", and not take a picture that looks like everyone else's.

If you go to greyhound events like the Solvang Greyhound Gathering, Greyhounds In Gettysburg, and Greyhounds Reach the Beach at Dewey Beach, you might see some dude occasionally photographing greyhounds by walking in front of the dog, keeping pace with it, and hunched over while holding a camera down at arm's-length, pointing it at the dog, and snapping pictures. Ummm...that would probably be me.

I would not be surprised if I amuse more people in this manner. I'm sure one of my friends has a picture or two of me doing this. But I like the different perspective from shooting this way. For example, this is Abbey, one of the greyhounds I took pictures of at Dewey:

I used a wide-angle lens to make sure the dog is in the field of view since I can't look through the viewfinder to see the dog (in this case, I'm using the 18-200mm zoom set at 18mm). I aimed the camera in the general direction of the greyhound, set the autofocus mode to "Auto Area AF" (the solid white rectangle icon on the back of the D300), and the focus mode to Continuous-servo AF (also known as AF-C) since the distance between me and the subject is always changing. Then I take a few shots and see what I get. Since wide-angle lenses have great depth-of-field pretty much everything is more or less in focus. But it also overly exaggerates the size of the nose compared to, say, the back legs.

Since I was in broad daylight I used my SB-800 flash to fill the shadows somewhat, and set the flash mode to slow-sync so that the foreground and background would be properly exposed.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom lens set at 18mm; shutter-priority mode with shutter speed set at 1/500 second and ISO 200; camera chose aperture of f/10; SB-800 used for fill-flash; flash mode set to SLOW; auto white balance; processed in Lightroom; shot in RAW.)

Slow-syncing Sadie the Stalker

Sadie stalks. If she is playing in one room while you are in another room, get her attention and look at her in some funny way. She will stop; she will look in your direction; she will slowly come towards you, then stop, jump, and give you a loud bark. It looks like this:

I wanted to capture her stalking in some unnerving sort of way. To get that effect I decided to use slow-sync flash mode. Slow-sync mode allows you to let in more light so that your backgrounds look more natural and not dark. But this also means your exposure time may be longer, so your subject may look smeared in the image. This is because the flash fires when the shutter first opens. While the shutter remains open if the exposure is long and the subject moves during the remainder of the exposure, the subject will appear blurry or smeared.

To switch to slow-sync mode on the Nikon, press the button with the bolt icon (usually located to the left and below the pop-up flash), and while holding that button down, turn the rear dial until you see the word "SLOW" in the top LCD panel.

I set the ISO to 800 since I was indoors, but I guessed the exposure would be long, but no idea how long. The exposure time ended up being 1.3 seconds. You can see the slow-sync effects: the hallway behind her is overexposed because of the lights in the kitchen, there is a distinct image of her when the flash fired, and there's also a ghostly blur as she walked towards me after the flash fired and before the shutter closed. I cropped and tilted the photo, then used a Lightroom develop preset to get an eerie look.