Bink!

A young Sadie and Nikki:

A young Katie and Nikki:

Nikki and Sadie:

Nikki and Katie:

Sadie and an ailing Nikki:

Casper, Freedom, and Nikki

Last year at Dewey I met Carrie of Tales and Tails fame while shopping at Beth and Pete Wade's place. Around that time another woman named Lori, who is Carrie's friend and writes a greyhound and art blog called What Remains Now, walked in with her husband and their three greyhounds, Casper, Freedom, and Nikki. We chatted briefly, then went on our separate ways.

This past August I got an e-mail from Lori asking to book a session at Dewey. Sure, I said. We agreed to meet on the street by our rental house. So on Saturday afternoon we met and walked over to the beach. There were clouds to shield us from the sun, but when there wasn't it got a little warm for everyone.

This is Casper:

His coloring is very much like our Katie's.

This is Freedom:

(Who doesn't love greyhound ears like this?)

And this is Nikki:

(Her leash was digitally removed.)

And I think I got a couple of decent family pictures:

(I can't say I know what the hounds were looking at.)

And:

Wow...I hadn't noticed that both Casper and Freedom are sitting. (By the way...all this fencing behind them was blown down by Hurricane Sandy this past Monday.) Might make for a decent Christmas card, no?

Nikki waits

She waits for us at the bridge...in the same way she waited for Gayle to come home at the end of a work day:

Four years ago last week...and it still doesn't seem real that she left.

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom at 18mm; program mode; camera chose shutter speed of 1/250 second at f/8 at ISO 200; auto white balance; normal JPG.)

In your ear

Yesterday I was browsing through some pictures I took back in October 2005 of Nikki and Sadie. We had had Nikki for eight years by then, and Sadie for a year. I was with them in the backyard patio, looking for an excuse to use my 70-200mm f/2.8 VR zoom (a wonderfully-made, but heavy, lens that I don't get to use often enough). They were acting pretty cute with each other so I waited to get a shot of them both. Nikki was sniffing Sadie's head as she sometimes did when I took this.

I had zoomed out to 70mm but because of the D200's crop factor of 1.5, my field of view was equivalent to a 105mm lens on a 35mm film or full-frame digital SLR. The lighting is a little unusual because they were standing in a patch of light falling on concrete, which in turn reflected the light upwards. So both girls are illuminated from underneath to a certain point, at which the rest of them is bluish due to them standing in shade.

This image has appeared in a Celebrating Greyhounds calendar, as well as on the Ohio State University's Greyhound Health and Wellness Program's website and their quarterly newsletters.

Six years since I took this picture. Six years...it doesn't seem possible.

(Shot with the Nikon D200 and the 70-200mm VR zoom set at 70mm; aperture-priority, with aperture set at f/5.6; camera chose shutter speed of 1/45 second at ISO 200; auto white balance; fine JPG.)

Nikki and the flower

My friends who had owned Turbo (the subject of my last post) are going to take a look at a brindle boy named "Teddy" and may end up adopting him. When I saw a couple of pictures of him posted on Greytalk yesterday I immediately noticed the white stripe running down the middle of his face. This reminded me of a picture I took of Nikki, who also had a white stripe when she was young.



This is a scan of a print from a roll of color negative film -- probably Kodacolor.

The occasion for taking this picture was a little photoshoot I was asked to do for a story that appeared in Celebrating Greyhounds magazine over 10 years ago about the many types of collars available for sighthounds. While we waited to get the collars together we had Nikki in an exercise pen that sat in the shade next to a friend's house. As she was standing next to a flower I thought I'd position myself so that it would be next to her collar as they were a little similar in color.

I'm positive I just used 1/60 sec as the shutter speed since I used a film camera (I'm not sure if it was a Nikon N70 or a Canon AE-1 Program) and knew nothing about fill-flash. The more I've looked at it the more mistakes I think I made here (could've removed the ex-pen, a background that's too bright and distracting, the light is too harsh...I'm sure there are others).

But I will say what redeems this picture to me: Nikki's youthful face without a hint of age, her alert expression, and her bright eyes. Funny, and a bit sad, that I don't really remember her looking this way. I just remember all the white on her face as she matured. But, either way, she was a gorgeous greyhound.

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.)

Anticipating the Moment...

When Nikki was scheduled for cancer surgery we decided we'd better take a lot of pictures of her with us. We knew she would be in good hands at the hospital, but still...

So the day before surgery we each took turns posing with Nikki indoors and outdoors. When Nikki and Rachel were inside I took four photos. Nikki was Rachel's heart dog, and made that pretty obvious:

I have learned that when trying to capture that special moment you can't wait until you actually see it in your viewfinder before releasing the shutter. If you do, it's already too late. While it is hard to know when, or even if, the moment will happen, I try to take the photograph an instant before I think it will. If I guess right, I get the shot. It's all about anticipating the moment.

(Shot with the Nikon D200, 18-200mm zoom set at 70mm, bounce-flashed Nikon SB-400, 1/60sec at f/5, ISO 280, program mode, matrix-metered, auto white balance, closest-subject focus mode.)

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.)