Semi wordless Wednesday

I have long had a love of photography. But only recently have I started to try and really use my camera outside of the auto mode.

Thankfully for me, I have two willing (ok semi willing) models.

I am still learning but I am pretty happy with how these two came out.

Soph has a wonderful sit stay and tolerates my constant photos

Swy is making great progress with his sit stays and tolerating my photo obsession. Also holding a treat by my head works ;-)

RallyFun Match in 3.5 weeks!

After my previous post about training, I found us a Rally Fun Match to compete in. No titles or points but a judge will be present and give us a score. I think it is great practice for us and I am looking forward to it.

Now I just need to work on Sophie's finish left, stand and pivot left. We have an issue with the left hand side apparently, lol!

I am looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend. Agility class tomorrow and then maybe some swimming on Sunday.

I have been trying to learn to use my camera in manual mode. I spent last Sunday at an agility show. I took over 500 pictures and then edited about 100 of them. Here are a few of my favorites.









The rest are on my flickr site.  While, I will never make a living off of photography, I am definitely enjoying getting out there and trying to learn!

Run Sophie Run!

Yay, I purchased photos from Sunday's tournament. By the time Sophie's retires, I will have spent a small fortune on photos.

The photographer, Carl Ferreira got some great photos of her mid run. No tug photos yet, maybe next time!

Waiting not so patiently for the Judge to reset the lgihts

\

And off she goes

A recap: Sophie's first year of flyball

This weekend's pictures have still not been uploaded to the site. But I did purchase a few photos from photographer Dave Mills from Sophie's first year of racing.

Dave is a fantastic photographer! He photographs most of the dog sports/events in the area.Check out his website for photos of agility, flyball, hunt tests, lure coursing and others.

We joined the team in Sept '09. Went to our first tournament in Feb'10 where Sophie spent the first day just getting used to the noise. The second day she ran warm ups, full runs on her first day! By April '10, she was running on the green team with 3 other new dogs. By July '10, she had moved to run part time with some of our regular dogs. By Sept'10 she had received her first four titles. By Nov'10, our team splintered and we became part of a new club. Our first year was a whirlwind! It had its ups and downs but overall it was a wonderful and fun year.

Completely non dog related: Random Post

This is a completely non dog related post (odd, I know!) But I figured some randomness makes for interesting reading.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I love photography. I am trying to learn how to use my camera to its full potential. A slow but fun process.

But one of my favorite things to photograph, in addition to Sophie of course, is Peruvian dances. I am lucky and live in an area of California with a fairly large Peruvian population so I have the opportunity to attend cultural dance shows on a somewhat regular basis. These pictures are from an event a few years back, Festidanza 2008.










The pictures are from two different performances of Marinera Nortena, the quintessential Peruvian dance.

And a video because, I love this performance (these kids are amazing and if I remember correctly her sash and his pin mean they are national champions!)