Dog Blog

Ruby (left) makes a new friend.

I love dogs.
I know that's not an earth-shattering statement. Everyone that has a dog loves them. It goes with the territory like the warm greeting at the door when you get home, like the puppy dog eyes you get when it's dinner time, like the creative sculptures you get to pick up every day.
One woman I heard recently put it best: "I could never give them as much as they give me".
What do they give me?
Incredible affection and attention.
Undeniable love.
Constant companionship.
Great photo ops.
This is a photo blog, right?
I take my 6-year old German Shepard/Chow mix Ruby to the dog park at Boca Ciega Park almost every day. When I began doing that, I just loved to watch her play with the other dogs, run off some of her extra weight and get stroked and petted by other dog lovers there who cannot resist her sweet disposition and incredibly pretty face.
She thinks it's a human park where she can soak up attention from other dog-lovers.
I think it's a photo op just waiting to happen.

Ruby makes friends with a pit bull.

(click any photo for larger view)

And relaxes under cover of Narnia, the gentle Newfoundland.

Dog parks are also great places to work on your photography skills. The action can be wild when they're wound up and chasing one another, playing and doing the other things they enjoy so much. Photographing a pack of dogs playing is a like photographing a sporting event. You have to anticipate the action, be ready at all times, look for and capture the peak action as well as the emotions the dogs display.

Rocky the Beagle (one of my favorite subjects because he's so animated, playful and cute) gets chased, overtaken and passed.

Imagine the series above in your local sports section of the newspaper, but instead of dogs, the photos show a head-to-head race between two high school track stars chasing the state championships. Do you see the correlation? Can you see the series above featuring track stars?

Good. I hope my point is well-taken.

Rocky gets chased by a German Shepard. This shot shows the technique called panning.

I normally go to the dog park about 4:30 in the afternoon. It's when many people are starting to get off work and get their dogs out to play after being home alone all day. It's also the time when the sun is beginning to get lower in the sky and the dog park is losing the afternoon light that illuminates it. Subsequently you must shoot with higher ISOs and slower shutter speeds to capture the action. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the shot above, I'm "panning" with the dogs as they run, or moving my camera and body at the same speeds as the dogs are running and clicking the shutter with a relatively slow shutter speed. In this case, it was 1/40th of a second. The results are that you get the blurred backround, which makes a person sense the movement of the dogs. You also get blurred legs on the dogs which helps to illustrate the speed at which they're running.

Again, you've probably seen this kind of photo in many sports photographs of runners, swimmers and other sports figures.

It's a technique that requires practice and patience. If you use too fast of a shutter speed, the motion you're looking for is stopped and you don't get the blurring of the legs and backround. If you use too slow of a shutter speed, you get too much of the blurring and it makes the dogs unrecognizeable.

This shot of an Australian Cattle Dog uses the same panning technique, but with a faster shutter speed (1/80th of a second). You can see that you get less blurring on the backround and on the legs of the dog, but still get the sense of motion.

I mentioned peak action above as something you want to be prepared for when photographing at a dog park, or anywhere for that matter.

This is Roxy the Pit Bull being suprised from behind by Ruby the Newfoundland. I'm not going to include the whole series here, but there were about 4 other frames of Roxy in the foreground of the shots I took with Ruby sneaking up behind her. This is the final frame as Roxy discovered the sneak attack.

Peak action, again. Rocky playfully bites Roxy's hind leg while playing at the Boca Ciega Dog Park.

Ruby the Newfoundland plays keepaway with a dog frisbee.

Ruby the Newfoundland plays tug-of-war with two black labradors.

Ruby joins the fracas.

From a photography standpoint, Dog Parks are wonderful places to practice your skills. They're also great places to meet other people who share your passions.

Shoot what you love and your photos will reflect your passions.

There's one more reason why shooting at a dog park can be an incredibly rewarding experience: The cuteness factor. All dogs have it. They're like children in the way that their faces are perfect and their actions are adoreable. Who could resist this Brichon Frise?

On the other end of the cuteness scale, this Neopolitan Mastiff mix below. This is more of an illustration of a portrait of a dog as opposed to the other techniques I mentioned. Dog parks are great places to practice your portrait techniques. But, beware, shooting dog portraits is like shooting a child's portrait: They don't pose, take direction well, listen, sit still or appreciate your efforts to cast them in the best possible light.

And, they don't smile on command.

But, with a face like this, you don't have to.