Fun with treats

During one photoshoot that I did during the Greyhounds in Gettysburg event (held at the end of last month) I had three Greyhounds jumping for treats at their owner's suggestion. This was to try and get some action shots of them. (Speaking of which: our two girls rarely jump for treats, and I would venture to say that a fair number of Greyhounds don't either. In fact our first Greyhound, Alex, would just follow the trajectory, from hand to ground, of any treat tossed to him. You could even bounce a dog cookie off his head and he would still not jump for it. This causes some people to think that Greyhounds are not particularly bright.)

Having not tried capturing this sort of action before, I went with shutter-priority and picked a shutter speed of 1/500 second to start with and adjusted accordingly.

Here are the contestants -- Tanzanite ("Tanzi" for short):

Opal:

Emerald:

We took the dogs individually and their owner tossed a cookie in the air while I tried to anticipate where the dogs were going to be when they jumped and caught it. In hindsight I would've made my job easier, I think, if I took a series of shots of each attempt. Instead, I took one shot per attempt, and taking it before the dog snapped at the treat.

Naturally there were a lot of misfires:

But then there are the succesful shots. Opal:

Emerald:

Tanzanite:

I learned that I need more practice. Now, if only our girls would cooperate...

(Shot with the Nikon D600 using the 50mm f/1.8 AF-D lens; shutter-priority mode with shutter speeds set at 1/500 or 1/1000 second; aperture varied from f/2 to f/4; ISO varied from 100 to 800; center-weighted metering; auto white balance; normal JPG; post-processed in Lightroom.)