Here’s lookin’ at ya!

Just a little fun I had with an image of a dog I met in a dog park.

It’s a dog’s life…

 

I was down at Blackie Spit yesterday, on the other side of the peninsula from White Rock, where most of my beach images are captured. It was a cloudless day, mild but a bit cooler than we’ve been getting in the past week. It was crowded! There’s an off-leash area just behind the beach parking, with quite a few dogs and their people hanging out and playing. I spent a little while watching and these are a few of the images I brought home, mostly of the lab. She was having great fun monopolizing the chase. I also have images of her running companion and a few others that I’ll post another time. Playing with my motion blurs again. 🙂 In the last one the dog is running through long grass, and I like how the dead grass heads break up the image.

 

Playtime!

My blog has been shelved for a few days but hopefully I’ll be back to normal daily posts again now. Happy New Year everyone! I want to thank everyone of you who has supported my blog via follows, likes and comments since I started it in early May 2014. I appreciate every single one of you. The number of followers is now creeping up on the 500 mark and I am chuffed to have that many of you on board already, so a BIG thank you to my followers. 🙂 For those of you kind enough to leave comments over the last 10 days or so, thank you so much… I will be getting to them in the next few days, I hope. I have not meant to leave you hanging!

We here in the extreme southwest corner of BC got a pretty mild December, and January doesn’t appear to be shaping up into anything severe either, in spite of what the rest of the country may be in store for. Today is a rather grey day, I’m not inspired to get out with my camera, so I dug up and processed some images captured a couple of years ago at a dog off-leash park during a quick trip to Edmonton, when the temps were somewhere in the minus high teens celsius. Brrr!

 

Christmas morning at the local pond

It was really quiet at the local pond when I first arrived there on Christmas morning. There were some ducks and merganzers fishing on the pond, and a heron, but otherwise it was totally quiet. The clouds hadn’t moved back in yet, and it was lovely soaking up some sun. It didn’t last long, of course. The clouds arrived about the same time as the dogs with their people. I stayed to watch these two brothers chase a stick in the water. It was fun watching them, and I had a little fun processing the images too.

Click on images for larger view.

 

Working dog

Hard working farm pooch catching a few zzz’s in the farmyard. This dog has been seen before on my blog last summer, in a post entitled Lunch on the Col de la Colombiere.

This time, I have used this image as this week’s Monochrome Madness entry. Everyone’s submissions can be seen at Leanne Cole’s blog, click here. I selected this image for monochrome because I felt it really emphasized the eyeful of textures.

 

 

Fluff ball blurs

While I was out walking last week looking for trees that would make good creative blurs I spotted this cute little terrier out for a walk with his/her people. I couldn’t resist…

  This last one just cracks me up every time I look at it! 🙂

 

 

 

Dog portrait

Click on image for larger view.

I was out with my camera all day today, capturing bird images out at the bird sanctuary before the storm hits us later this week so I didn’t have a chance to process any recent images today. Instead you get to see that nice dog I featured a couple of weeks ago, the one that we met up in the mountains north of Lake Geneva. Such a sweet dog, here shown snuggling with her person.

I don’t usually go to the sanctuary on weekends because I prefer to go when it’s less busy, but I thought today might be okay because when I left home it was just starting to rain. But halfway to the sanctuary it began to clear off. There were some totally awesome clouds hanging over Vancouver but there was nowhere where I could pull over and capture them. By the time I got near the sanctuary the clouds were clearing off completely and it was turning into a glorious day. As a result, half of the city was out walking the dykes looking at the birds. Oh well.

My 55-250mm lens has been driving me nuts recently with the autofocus frequently not giving me good results. I usually shoot in manual mode, but with autofocus 75% of the time. I’ve been reading up on back button focusing, so without holding my breath, today I decided to give it a try. It took me a while to get used to it, as well as having to fiddle with two buttons instead of one, but by the end of the day, even though a couple of times I froze up and had to stop and think about which button was doing what, it was all feeling much more natural. More to the point, by the end of the day I LOVED focusing that way! I just have to practice the technique more so it’s totally automatic. I brought home a much  higher percentage of clear images than I’m accustomed to — when I saw them on my computer display I was delighted! I wish I’d tried this much much sooner!