Adventure Art will be attending the Fair City Dog Training Club Agility Show at Scone Palace on the 9th of May – Saturday only – to photograph the agility competition.

I won’t be able to cover more than one ring at a time, so if you are not in that ring and would like a shot of your dog competing, please let me know when and where you will be on.  Similarly if you have any special requests e.g. your dog in the weaves or contact equipment rather than jumping, please ask and I’ll see what I can do.

I’ll also be taking some portraits between and after classes, so if you would like a portrait shot of your dog (with or without rosettes!) please come and speak to me to arrange a suitable time.  Portraits at events are taken on the same basis as all other event photos – you have no obligation to buy, just purchase the shots you like from the website as normal.

If you would like to arrange a private portrait shoot on another day for your dogs (and you can combine with some friends if you wish), again please come over for a chat or drop me an email.

A lovely Saturday spent at the Kingdom of Fife Dog Agility Show held at the Lomond Centre in Glenrothes.

I was shooting event photographs of the agility, and also got to see my own dog Nevis competing.  Nevis is an old hand at modelling (if not agility) – he always has his eye on the camera.

With the nice weather, there was loads of light and so for a change I wasn’t having to shoot at the limits for my camera.  This gave me the flexibility to get a really high shutter speed to freeze the dog’s movements (about 1/1000 of a second), yet keep a decent aperture (f5.6-8) to ensure a reasonable depth of field.

There is a bit of a trade-off with depth of field when photographing dog agility though – more is great because you will get more dogs in focus at the critical point of the jump. The downside is that all the extraneous background clutter (other jumps, spectators etc) also has more chance of being in focus and distracting from the subject.

The small dogs are amazing to watch – they seem to jump many multiples of their own height.

In between classes, I managed to fit in a few quick portrait sessions – this one with a proud dad and three of his pups..

We popped along to help out at the dog show at Howe Country Centre as both our border collies are currently in agility training, and Nevis is due to compete in his first serious competitive show next month.

I decided to take some dog agility photos while I was there – it was fantastic to watch!

From a photographic point of view dogagility events are much harder to shoot than showjumping – dogs are so much smaller and faster than horses, but also much less predictable. When you look at showjumping course, it is very easy to predict exactly which line a horse is going to take, there is a pretty well defined spot where a horse will take off, and there is an almost imperciptle point where a horse will almost hang in the air waiting for its photograph to be taken.

Dogs – well, they make their own rules. They might take off right underneath the jump, or they might take off 4 feet before it. They might take the shortest line through the corner of the jump, or they might rely on their speed and take any line which fits. They might be looking towards the next jump, or they might be looking back towards their handler to see what’s happening next. All of which makes the photographer’s job much more difficult – if it wasn’t hard enough already trying to photograph a small, fast-moving object in poor light.

But I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I’m getting a good handle on how to successfully photograph dog agility events. We got some great shots on the day, and I’m looking forward to Nevis’ big competition in April.

Our border collie Nevis had his first competition this weekend at the Kingdom of Fife Fun Dog Agility Show.

It was a fairly gloomy winters day, and the dog show venue at Highfield near Collessie has pretty poor lighting – I was shooting at the maximum usable ISO setting. But that’s why I’ve invested a large sum of money in the equipment that I have – it can produce reliable results no matter what the conditions.

One of the problems of dog agility shows is there is a very high percentage of black and white collies which can look identical in small thumbnail photos – so I’ve learned it is essential to get a shot of the handler too, so that people can tell which dog is which on the website!