This handsome chap turned up on our doorstep this morning, so I decided to do a quick dog portrait session while we tried to track down where he was from.

– Hello, is that the Mill Farm?

– Yes

– I don’t suppose you’ve lost a sheep dog have you? We found one at our back gate this morning.

– Oh, yes, the boys said they were missing one this morning

– A black and white Collie?

– Yes. Emm… do you have a bitch in heat?

– Yes, I think Skye might be.

– Ah, that’ll be Joe then. I’ll send someone to collect him.

I’ve just uploaded a gallery of the cutest puppy portaits – this is Murphy, a new dog in our village.  He’s some sort of collie/terrier cross – he’s a rescue dog, so no-one is quite sure.

Anyway he was a great subject for a puppy photo session.  Of course I did suffer the usual pet photographers problem of a lick on the lens, and then Murphy dancing on my head rather than posing for the camera.

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..

Down to some  stables near Cupar in Fife today to do a photo shoot with an animal physiotherapist for her new website.

It was a really fascinating session – just seeing the way she works which is very subtle and gentle but seems to have a dramatic effect on the horse.  I was trying to stay in the background and photograph as unobtrusively as possible – we didn’t do any setup shots, they were all taken in the course of a normal horse physio treatment.

Back next week to do some shots of dog physiotherapy.

There was a beautiful still mistiness to this morning in Fife.

Walking the dogs along the railway line on the way back from the stables, I spotted some deer on the other side of the track. They were far enough away not to be bothered by my presence, and milled around for quite a while before casually taking off across the fields.

It still amazes me what photos will sell for stock – as this one did yesterday.  In this case it is quite literally a  ‘stock photograph’ in both senses of the word.

I took this photo about 3 years ago at a the West Fife agricultural show.  I’m not quite sure why I did – but it seems it was the perfect shot for somebody’s text book.