Katie on her dog bed

I shared this photo (also on this blog two years ago) on Instagram yesterday as Facebook has been reminding me over the past three weeks about Katie's impending -- and then subsequent -- surgery and recovery. You can see where her IV was inserted, her incision, and the shrinking bruising area. A couple of days prior she had decided for herself that she wanted to go lie on top of her dog bed instead of the spare mattress we had set up for her to lie on as she recovered from her surgery. That's where I found her. At this point of time she was almost a week removed from her amputation.

It still pains me at times when I think about her now; I'll never get completely over it. I feel like that for Alex, Nikki, and Sadie (who died six months after Katie) who came before her, and I'll feel like that for Bean and Billy Bob (who came after her) whenever their time comes. But I look at all the pictures I took of Katie and I can better appreciate the nearly ten years she graced our household.

There are a lot of Katie memories, both good and bad, in those pictures. But Katie is in there, and that's really all that matters.

It's National Black Dog Day

To recognize this day I'll share this photo of Sadie that I took back in 2008. Here she was playing bitey-face with Katie.

Still miss these two girls a lot -- always will.

Pain and Remembrance

I don't know if anyone is still reading this blog or not; I haven't added anything to this blog since a couple of weeks after Sadie died on St. Patrick's Day. I am sorry if you've been holding out and waiting for the past three months for something new from me. Her death had stolen most, if not all, of my motivation to write about pictures I have taken of Greyhounds and their owners. Oh, I do have plenty of pictures to share and give you a little background about them...but writing about it had seemed pointless without her (or Katie, for that matter).

We were without Greyhounds (or dogs) in the house for the first time in twenty years. That span lasted for two months, and it was the worst two months ever.

Fortunately I had planned to join two of my friends on an East Coast roadtrip to see a third friend run in the Boston Marathon for the first time. And I was lucky that I had photo shoots to do with a customer in Williamsburg, NY, and at the Greyhounds in Gettysburg event in late April. It was a great distraction for me, but still I caught myself weeping several times (like on the Amtrak train that we took from Boston to New York, or on the Metro in New York) because I missed her so much. My two traveling companions understood, and helped me a great deal.

And shortly after returning from Gettysburg our daughter and I prepared to drive to Minnesota and back to pick up a seven-month-old female Greyhound puppy (who our daughter named "Bean"), fostered for two months by my friend Aimée and her husband.

I promise to write about how Puppy Bean came to join our family in the very near future.

It was early this evening that Puppy Bean was lying on the front lawn, and I was sitting and watching her while holding the end of her leash. And as I watched I was suddenly reminded of a picture I took of Katie eleven days after her leg amputation. So I took our my smartphone and tried to get a picture of Bean as I had done with Katie.

As I tried to frame the picture it then occurred to me that tomorrow (Tuesday, 8 July) will be a year and a week since Katie's operation. It again saddened me terribly that she was no longer here, and those feelings of loss overcame me anew. I remembered what I told her at the end:

"I'm so sorry, Katie, that we could not save you."

As I have told some of my Greyhound friends who let me vent and hug and cry on their shoulders about Katie since her death, I will forever resent the fact that we did not even get the chance to treat her for the lymphoma that eventually took her so swiftly from us. If we just had the chance...

Katie's portrait is done

We received Katie's portrait from Xan a few days ago. Seeing the painting develop on a web page is one thing, but having the finished portrait in your hands and seeing it in its full glory is something entirely different...and so much better.

 

You can see in the animated GIF how the painting came to be.

Thanks to our friends who commissioned Xan to do this portrait of our beloved Katie, and to Xan for a wonderful painting that will be cherished forever.

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.)

Katie (2003 - 2013)

Katie goes for a ride

I thought I'd write something about Katie enjoying a short ride down the street from our home and blah blah blah...

I'll let Katie's face tell you all you need to know how she's doing these days.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 18-35mm zoom; program mode; 1/250 second at f/8 at ISO 800; auto white balance; center-weighted metered; shot in RAW, converted to DNG and imported into Lightroom.)

Katie 48 days post-amp

After attempting to take a few more pictures of Katie in the early evening light while I had her standing on our front lawn and not being happy with the results, I led both her and Sadie back to our front door to let them inside. While Katie was standing there, waiting, I took one snap and hoped I could at least get a bit of eye color to show up.

Most of the time her eyes look like a couple of black holes in her face. And if you try to compensate for that by opening up your aperture more, you'll overexpose her white fur too much.

I really cropped closely around her eyes, and used an adjustment brush to lighten them to make them a little more visible. At first I thought I should add a little warmth to eliminate the bluish tint (it comes from standing in the shade) by increasing the white balance temperature but I thought, nah -- I liked it better this way. I also sharpened her eyes and the area between them a little, but not too much.

Katie is coming along nicely: she weighs nearly four pounds more than after losing her leg. She barks at the inivisible mailman, sometimes claws us with her leg, and leaps into the back of our van when she goes for a ride.

Speaking of rides, I have another picture to share...

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 50mm f/1.8 lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set to f/2.8; shutter speed 1/500 second at ISO 800; center-weighted; auto white balance; shot in RAW, converted to DNG and imported into Lightroom.)

What is yours is mine...

...and what is mine, is mine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Katie...I get it: you might be minus a limb but you still claim my pillow any chance you get.

Katie was 41 days post-amp when this picture was taken.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 50mm f/1.8 lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set to f/1.8, shutter speed 1/50 second at ISO 220; auto white balance; normal JPG; imported and converted to black-and-white using Lightroom.)

Katie 25 days post-amp

I needed an excuse to practice with my Pocket Wizards and the SB-800 flash, so I decided I'd try them out with Katie as I had never made even a half-serious attempt to try them on her yet.. I had made an attempt with her previously by taking her outside and using my umbrella, but it was clear from the one picture where she stood still long enough that I didn't know what I was doing. So just to simplify things I tried to get a picture of her indoors, dispense with the umbrella stand and just hold the flash in my left hand while holding the camera with my right.

Katie was clearly up to posing for me as I took a few snaps: she'd been feeling more like herself after her first chemo dose a couple of weeks earlier. So it wasn't too hard to get her attention by saying a few choice words to her and ending up with a picture this:

I bounced the flash off the ceiling and used a large aperture to blur the background. After importing the picture into Lightroom I lightened and added a bit of clarity and saturation to her eyes. It's not a good picture by any means, but I wanted to capture that expression of hers.

(Shot with the Nikon D600, SB-800, and Pocket Wizards; aperture priority with aperture set to f/2.8 at 1/60 second and ISO 400; center-weighted; normal JPG.)

Getting into a habit

Since Katie's amputation the girls have gotten into the habit of wanting to nap in the back of our van.

(Taken with the iPhone and processed using Camera Awesome.)

Katie hears a noise -- 11 days post-amp

By eleven days post-amp, when this picture was taken, Katie had been going outdoors to lie on our front lawn for awhile. Sometimes she would take a short nap in the sun; other times I thought it was to get out of the house at night because it was cooler outdoors.

Before spending a few minutes on the front lawn with her, I had my iPhone with me and tried to get a few pictures. I lay prone on the sidewalk to get a little below her eye level. Then I waited for a moment. I used the Camera Awesome app to get this vintage effect of Katie hearing something going on in the alley across the street:

Sometimes I don't feel like taking my Nikon outside: it's so much easier to just pull my iPhone out of my pocket and take a snap. Cell phone cameras were terrible when they first came out, but the iPhone camera is very good, and it is so easy to share a photo on Facebook with those you know.

Katie doesn't always misbehave...

Since her leg amputation surgery over two weeks ago Katie has been very good (for the most part) about leaving her incision alone as it healed. I have caught her licking the area of the t-shirt that covers the scar, but she could be so much worse about it. I don't doubt for a moment that it has to be itchy.

A week ago she wanted to go into our bedroom where one of her dog beds is (most Greyhounds have several dog beds in the house). She has this habit of leaning over one side of the bed and placing her front leg outside and alongside it, and assumes this particular pose. It looks kind of confident and self-assured. Anyway, after she had laid down for a few minutes, I thought I'd better check on her to make sure she wasn't licking the wound since I was in another room. When I peeked in I saw her posing, so I walked over to the dining room where my camera was, switched lenses, and returned to the bedroom. She was still there, posing, so I took a few quick snaps and hoped I got a good image. Unfortunately, the color on her head in the picture was really bizarre compared to her body, so I converted it to black-and-white. Even then, the conversion was not very good, although I liked her pose and the expression on her face.

I thought I'd make an image macro of it just for fun, so here's the end result:

By the way Katie got her staples out several days ago and got her first dose of chemo. Now we need to make sure she gets enough calories to gain some weight.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 and 105mm macro lens; aperture-priority, aperture set to f/4.5, shutter speed 1/40 second at ISO 6400; auto white balance; imported into Lightroom and converted to black-and-white; normal JPG.)

Sadie and Katie snuggle

Sadie is a snuggler; Katie is not. Sadie is needy and likes reassurance; Katie, not so much. Katie is not particularly fond of anyone lying very close to her. She will not bite if it happens, but she will usually get up and leave to go lie down somewhere else.

So to find Katie sleeping in a dog bed with Sadie's face so close to hers last week as Katie continued to recover from her surgery...well, we had to get a few pictures.

They slept together like this for awhile. It was comforting to see them like this.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 and 18-35mm zoom at 35mm; aperture-priority, with aperture set to f/4.5; shutter speed of 1/15 second at ISO 6400; auto white balance; imported and converted to black-and-white using Lightroom; normal JPG.)

Katie -- one week post-amp

(Shot with the Nikon D600 and 18-35mm zoom lens at 35mm; aperture-priority with aperture set at f/4.5; shutter speed 1/40 second at ISO 4000; +0.7 exposure compensation; center-weighted metered; normal JPG; imported into Lightroom and processed using the blue filter preset.)

Waiting...

This past week we've been preparing for Katie's surgery tomorrow to amputate her right front leg. Last Tuesday Katie went to see a canine oncologist for an FNA appointment. The oncologist thought the humerus had not eroded enough to allow an FNA to be done -- and she was right. We took that as a good thing.

We are probably making it harder on ourselves by all the fretting we're doing. In the meantime, Katie just lives for the present and keeps things simple. Katie looked like this yesterday afternoon when I offered her a cookie:

If you have a moment and think of it, keep her in your thoughts tomorrow and for the days ahead.

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 50mm f/1.8 lens; aperture-priority, with aperture set to f/5.6; 1/100 second at ISO 6400; center-weighted; +0.7 exposure compensation; normal JPG.)

Katie joins Club Osteo

Not the club I want her, Sadie, or any other Greyhound to join.

Bink!

A young Sadie and Nikki:

A young Katie and Nikki:

Nikki and Sadie:

Nikki and Katie:

Sadie and an ailing Nikki:

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.)

Other favorite pictures of mine from 2012

Some other favorite pictures of mine that I took during 2012...

Sadie licks her nose:

Katie stares at me while lying on our bed:

Tadeo the galgo waits for me to give him a treat:

Jen and Skye at Dewey Beach:

A crescent moon and a weather vane in Solvang:

JJ the tripod at Greysave's spring picnic:

Josie Bean at Oktoberfest:

Carson: