Dogs on the Nova Scotia cottage area beach are pretty happy critters. No leashes, fun to run, dig, roll in the sand and water, chase birds and waves, have fun being free to run around as they accompany their humans. When they see me, a new human to get attention from (there usually aren’t too many people on the beach at once), they get excited and start running towards another excuse to go full tilt towards greeting. But then. This weird human sits in sand and puts black thing in front of its face and points at it. This is not predicted behaviour. Critter pulls up short and stops, pondering situation. When I put the camera down and put hand out, many will cautiously come up and make friends. Some will just tiptoe around me, keeping an eye out for other unpredictable behaviour.
This is a shoot-because-you-are-there, not necessarily because it’s the best-time-of-day-for-it shot. I love happy dogs. Love this fellow’s body language and how I managed to get him in focus, but his feet are blurry. On this day, this fellow was one of a group of 3 that was walking with 2 women. I took my shots as they dashed in front of their humans then turned around since the tide was turning and I had walked too long already — I needed to get around the point before the water covered the easy to navigate area. But then I heard some loud calls from behind me. The women had seen me shoot their dogs and were trying to call my attention because they wanted copies of the shots. No paper, so one wrote her email address in the sand and I photographed it.
As for shooting, there was something written somewhere about how violent photography sounds. Shoot, capture, grab… Shooting dogs just doesn’t sound right, does it? Anyone have a better term? This reminds me of when a friend got in trouble on Twitter once because he talked about keying a car and a person reading his Tweet was outraged that someone would brag about being a vandal. The friend was a VFX artist. When you key something, simply put, you are digitally isolating a subject from a background using computer software.