Family Dog 3

Dog Blog Post #233: Why is it I can never think of good titles until after I've published the post? Take that picture at the top of yesterday's post - the one with Henry and the broom. I was going about my day, thinking about the usual things, when the perfect title suddenly popped into my head...

"You are feeling sweepy...."

(OK - maybe not perfect, but a heck of a lot better than the nothing title (literally - it was blank!) that I put below it yesterday.)

But I digress...

Today was Family Dog Class #3 for Henry. You may recall that Mother Nature put the kibosh on last weeks class, and so, after two whole weeks to turn into an adolescent pest, we reconvened to find that Henry was...

... fine. He was quite comfortable in class, enjoyed his rawhide chew when Wendy was talking, enjoyed his treats when we were working, did some very nice recalls (I had peanut butter), and didn't mind any of the wiggly, jiggly, weird textured items Wendy arranged for them to walk over. I worked quite a bit on his pop-up downs, and he made definite progress.

The only hitch was the A-Frame, which he suddenly decided was a Very Scary thing, indeed. As I don't plan on doing agility, this is not a problem, but I will try to work with him a bit on going up/down things this week to see if I can't gently change his mind. He enjoyed the A-Frame the last time he did it, a few months ago, so I'm not quite sure what changed. Hormones, fear period, POM (phase of the moon),...

The most obvious difference is that he watched Wendy set it up this time. Perhaps he now doubts its structural integrity. (Hey, it could happen... or maybe not.)

Today's Daily Shoot assignment:

Change your point of view. Make a photograph from an unusual point of view today.

Oh, cool! I like these sorts of things. I had it all planned out. It was going to look something like the picture at the top of the post. Ok... it was going to be the picture at the top of this post. But then a certainly cute little boston terrier beat me to that point of view.

Rats.

Well, yes, I could have used it anyway. No law against that. And I did upload it as an alternate. But perhaps I could come up with something a bit... different... something more like... this:

From the comments I've received so far, it appears I might have succeeded. (I particularly enjoyed the "grossly delightful" comment!)

This was very much a "brute force" sort of shoot. I knew what I wanted, I had what I felt was a good setup, and I basically just kept taking pictures and resetting and taking pictures and resetting until I figured I had enough.

What's enough? Turns out enough was approximately 125 shots, of which exactly two (2) were clear enough to warrant consideration. There was no finesse, no art, and for once I wished I had a manual focus so I could set the distance and just snap the pictures instead of waiting for the auto-focus (macro mode) each time.

For the curious, the second clear shot is below:

Had you been able to make out the texture of the tongue better, I might have chosen it. I liked the black background, and the fact the method used to get the "pose" is practically invisible. But without texture, it just look like a slice of Canadian bacon to me (perhaps inspired by the Hawaiian pizza I had the night before.)