Give me a dog for a day and I'm likely to dribble excitedly in its company. Give me a camera and I'm liable to talk complete gibberish for hours at a time. Give me dogs AND a camera and I'm like a puppy that has just discovered that a toilet rolls rip when it sinks its teeth into it...
Yesterday was the first day with Ellie as part of the ICC Canine Display Team at Belton International Horse Trials. She, like all the other dogs that formed part of the team, behaved perfectly well, and performed her part of the routine as expected. Come the day and come the hour, all dogs did remarkably well.
However, I have a confession to make... The event took second place for me after the sheer love of being armed with a camera and enough dogs to keep me snapping pictures all day long. I was so spoilt for choice that I returned home with a staggering 350 images on my camera. After throwing out the obvious poor ones, I'm still left with 180, and that was just from Friday. I then took another 100+ on Saturday, though I took quite a few of the horses and some from
Woodland Waters, where we visited on the way home. Lord help me, I still have Sunday to go yet!
It's going to take me quite a few days to filter through the images, though I do have a few already in my Flickr album. I have created a dedicated
ICC Dogs and Events set of images so that people can find their respective dogs more easily. You can also view them in a
larger format slideshow, which I think is preferable.
Please bear with me. I'm adding images as and when I go through them. I'm adding the individual dog images first, then the photos taken during the routines. Also bear in mind that I don't have the email addresses of individuals from ICC, so if you happen to know someone else, please do point them to the album too, as they may well want to see their photos too.
If anyone is able to help me put names to any of the dogs (and handlers) shown in any of the photos, that would be great. I hate leaving my photos without proper titles. You can contact me at young.maz@googlemail.com if you can name any of the dogs. You just need to provide the current title number (example: DSCF7761) and the names of those shown in the corresponding photo.
It was great to meet so many 'dog people' at the event on Friday and Saturday, and I look forward to seeing them all again for the final day, tomorrow. There are so many talented dogs...
Incidentally, the Rottweiler (Teal'cy) featured in the photo above is the one who is coming to stay with me for a week next week. I shall be like a child in a sweetie-shop! I so love that dog! She's like a big gentle bear and it's just my favourite breed.
And finally, the images shown online are a lower-resolution and much smaller size than I have on my computer. I have to do this in order to reduce upload times and enhance download speeds, etc. If anyone would like an original full-size and hi-resolution copy of any pictures shown in the album, please do let me know and I shall e-mail you an original copy.
3 comments:
Lovely pictures! You take amazing photos. What kind of camera are you using? I'm hoping to be in the market for a digital camera soon. I'm tired of having to use my video camera for taking snapshots lol.
Also please include pictures of the horses here or on Flickr. I love horses as much as I love dogs. Also are there going to be any of Ellie? I'm glad you had fun and she performed well.
Thanks for the comments. I'm an enthusiastic amateur photographer. Are you crazy? Asking me to talk about cameras is suicide.... :)
I use a Fujifilm Finepix S8000fd. You get very slightly lower quality (there are fewer sensors) than you would get using a full-blown digital SLR camera, but you get many advantages. It's much lower in price for a start, and the 18x optical zoom means you don't have to carry multiple lenses around for different purposes.
It will also allow you to use it in fully automatic mode or, when you feel a little braver, use it in fully manual mode. I think it's a great camera to get prior to getting a more expensive digital SLR. It means you can practise and get used to aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc. However, it doesn't have a RAW mode which is not a major issue for me but it could be for some people.
I shall add the horse pictures to Flickr when I get to them. I have a few of them jumping.
There are a couple of Ellie but there were so many dogs and I was there to photo the whole team, so I didn't like to focvus on any one dog too much. I shall get a few more today just to be sure. :)
Thanks again for the comment.
I'll do a search online for that camera. I don't have the experience to try to be doing it in manual mode so I'm fine with not having raw mode. Thanks for the info. I've been using my boss's really expensive digital camera at work and I think I'm spoiled lol! I just want something that will take nice still shots. I'm getting tired of the blurry snapshots from my video camera.
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