Nine in July

Whenever an upcoming greyhound retirement day is announced I look forward to it. It's always fun to see the new arrivals. And it's interesting to see glimpses of their personalities, even through the stress of leaving the familiar territory of racetrack and kennel.

Since it was around noontime the shadows were strong and deep, so I used my flash to lighten them. Even then I did not set the flash compensation to 0, but instead used my usual -0.7. Turning down the flash's power when standing under the shade of a tree results in the picture being a little dark but the shadows created by the flash are not too obvious:

On the other hand, for this picture I set the flash compensation back to 0 because I was standing in brilliant sunshine:

It's more obvious that I used flash here.

Most of the time I just take head shots of the greyhounds. But I wanted to get both the greyhound and Marissa both in the same shot here:

There was a certain black-and-white female greyhound named "Pookie" that a lot of people noticed and liked immediately. Here are several pictures of her:

She got very excited being talked to in baby-talk -- she has a very happy tail.

Jesse the Chinese Crested did his part in small-dog testing (he played the part of the small dog):

With this group of dogs Jesse pretty much had no problem with any of them.

Kinko again played the part of the cat. Doesn't this need the caption "Draw me like one of your French girls"?:

(Look that up if you don't know what I'm referring to.)

(Shot with the Nikon D300 using the 18-200mm zoom, the 50mm lens, and the SB-800 flash. Normal JPG.)