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..

The sales report from my stock agency today highlighted two images sold for a UK newspaper usage.  The reports usually don’t include the name of the client, and can be a bit vague on dates of usage, but after a bit of digging around on the web I managed to track them down to the The Independent on Saturday 10th January.

These shots were taken at an ice-climbing competition, the Gorzderette, in Champangy-le-haut, France.  Myself and Neil were taking part for most of the day, but there was still plenty of time for pictures.  The two the paper have chosen are not actually my favourites – I prefer this one:

When I was at Uni The Independent was my favourite paper, and it was my greatest ambition to get some photos in the paper – it was then at the pinnacle of classy photo-journalism. I think their standards have dropped some since then, but still – another ambition ticked!  Unfortunately now that I’ve had a lot of photos published over the years, my first thought was not

‘Wow, I’ve got a picture in The Independent‘

it was more

‘Wow, The Independent doesn’t pay much, does it?’