Patience: The Secret Weapon
I’m always amazed at how expressive dogs are. It’s the position of their head, their ears, and their tails. Some dogs will bark or try to run away. Every dog owner can read their dog at a glance and often knows how to deal with their dog’s fear.
Once I was photographing a Greyhound rescue and his owner, Georges. His Greyhound, “The Duke” was terrified of everybody. Duke would only stay around me when Georges, his owner, kept his hand on his side. As soon as Georges would take his hand off, Duke would try to leave. Actually, I took advantage of this by being able to take so many photos showing their relationship.
Here are two worried dogs, Teddy, a Bichon Frise and Daisy, a mini Doodle. Both were totally silent, not even a peep which is quite rare especially with small dogs. They always stayed close to Sasha. This was our third encounter and I would have thought that by then they would be more relaxed with me and my camera. Our first encounter was about an hour at their apartment, so they would get used to my presence. Three days later, we had our first session and finally this session, the following Saturday. By that point they were not afraid anymore, but they were still worried.
We were on the Vancouver Seawall. It’s always a great place for walking with dogs, the only only problem is that often small dogs, like Teddy and Daisy, are not used to longer walks. So, we took many breaks and it turned out that the better photos were ones taken during the breaks. Sasha didn’t realize that we were going to walk “so much”. She didn’t have walking shoes, she used her Uggs. We didn’t walk much, may be 20mn in total with at least one hour of “breaks.”
Camera: Canon 70D ISO 100 and 1/250
Lens: Canon 70-200mm f/4 @70mm and f/4
Processed with Darktable: https://www.darktable.org/