Silken

One of the things I love about photographing dog events is that in addition to all the dog breeds I'm familiar with, there are always the random rare breeds like this Silken Windhound.  When I got the Run Sheet earlier this week for the event and saw the breed on the list, I was hoping it wouldn't be a last minute cancel.  This is a fairly new dog breed (only about 30 years old), not yet recognized by the American Kennel Club but nevertheless an accepted breed.  In their genetic history are both Whippets and Borzois.  They are Whippet sized, maybe even a bit smaller with silky soft coats.  

It was a fun day, a bit more relaxed than yesterday's Obedience Trials since Rally tends to be less stringent.  It was also a shorter day, with a finish at about 3 PM which was nice.  Many of the dogs today were familiar to me and I enjoyed photographing all of them.  And I am coming to know many of the owners which makes the events fun since I'm not a stranger now. 

In total for the weekend, I took over 3,000 pics although many will be deleted.  I find the fluorescent lighting in the arena very difficult to shoot in.  Although it look nice and light, I need to crank up the ISO just to manage the exposure.  And then you get the weird color cast from fluorescent so I need to do more editing that I'm used to.  I tried shooting with the in-camera White Balance set for fluorescent yesterday, but wasn't thrilled with the output so went back to Auto WB today knowing that I'd have to adjust in LR.  Strangely, this is all part of the appeal of photographing these events - it forces me to come up with solutions to challenging shooting conditions, learn more about editing, and so on.  Plus, of course, I love seeing the dogs.

When I got home, Jax gave me a thorough sniffing, no doubt smelling all the dogs I dallied with today.  Then he kept watch while I checked my nest boxes.  The two boxes of wrens are so full of little feathered young that I can't get an accurate count although I have no reason to think all that hatched have survived.  The bluebirds, on the other hand, seem to have only 2 chicks left in addition to one unhatched egg.  When I checked their box earlier this week I thought I could only see two nestlings and that is how things looked today as well, so... something happened.  From what I can tell from my hastily snapped cell phone pic, the remaining nestlings appear to be healthy and well-feathered.  

A busy week coming up with the first priority being to cull the photos and get Galleries up.  I like the editing process for the most part, so this isn't an onerous task as it might be for some.

Off to bed...

xoxo
Debbi

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