We ran across this guy at Taos Pueblo in New Mexico — apparently nobody actually keeps dogs as family pets, so a half dozen or so dogs just wander around as strays / community pets. Judging by his left eye, this one got in a scuffle recently.
It took me some tinkering in Aperture before I got happy with this shot — it just looks better to me as a pseudo-antique than as a full color image.
Near the end of our recent trip to Washington, D.C., we’d done a big drive down through Virginia to see some old plantations. Rather than drive around the bulk of the Charles river in order to get back to our hotel, we opted to take the Jamestown ferry to get across the river to Williamsburg. As we left the Virginia shore, these two watched the show:
The pier and gulls are maybe a bit darker than I’d like, but I love how the water bokeh came out. What do you think?
When my daughter and I walked through the Phoenix zoo a few weeks back, we were greeted by one of the locals. I don’t know what (s)he was trying to tell us (“go away?” “bring sugar-water next time?”), but for a while it kept chattering around us.
At least the little critter was content to sit still on a branch for a bit so I could capture its portrait.
Can you call a squabble a territorial dispute when it takes place on water? At any rate, we were headed out of the Phoenix zoo when we saw these two trying to settle boundary issues with each other:
In the end, one of them turned tail and swam off, with the winner in pursuit.
A recent trip to Arizona left me and the little one with some time on our hands — so we spent it at the Phoenix Zoo. While I was there, this little scene lined up for me, so I just had to capture it:
I spotted this little guy on a bush while we were out looking at plantations in the Virginia countryside.
Given that we were primarily looking at the architecture, I’m glad I accidentally spotted him…
A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:
I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:
1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).
2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.
3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.
So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).
One of the constants when you’ve got a kid in grade school is that you’ll be seeing a lot of small animals in order to keep your own small fry entertained. So it was that when the National Western Stock Show came to town this year, we just had to check out something called “Dances with Dogs.”
The event’s put on by a local group of people who dance with their dogs to keep them (both humans and canines) entertained and exercised. Here’s a miniature poodle dancing with her human:
I just love the engrossed look on the little dog’s face…
This blue merle Australian Shepherd was also part of the dancing:
On a trip to the Westminster Butterfly Pavilion a few weeks back, we saw this interesting crowd on a cluster of branches:
I’m not sure why it was such prime real estate for the little critters, but they were all putting in a good effort to chase their neighbors off the twigs. At any one time, at most 4 butterflies were on the branches while 3 or 4 were hovering nearby, trying to take their places.
Another shot from the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colorado — this time of some honeybees in an indoor display case:
You’ve probably seen them, those honeybee cases in botanical gardens and such. The honeybees get to build their hive indoors, with a tube leading outside to an area with flowers. Meanwhile visitors get to see them hard at work.
I discovered something on this visit — regardless of the temperature indoors, the honeybees seem to be far less active when it’s cold outside. Even though I had my ring flash, I think the bees’ slow motions helped me get a nice, sharp image here. Unfortunately, you can also see a little bit of a smudge on the glass over on the left side of this shot.
Originally posted to the old blog on January 5, 2009; on Flickr over here.