Dogs

A few months ago Tara's brother announced that he and his wife were thinking of getting a dog. Not just any dog, a Vizsla puppy. They had a lot of questions for Tara and she did her best to answer them.

A couple of weeks ago they got their puppy and brought him by (photo - warning: cuteoverload material). He is a bundle of energy and a lot of fun. At only 10 weeks, he requires a lot of work and training and patience and ear plugs.

Tara got the dog bug; she and I have been talking about getting a dog for the past month or so. I blame Tim and his cute puppy :). Tara grew up with dogs and she had one when we first got married (it lived at her parents place and in the end was really their dog). Tara brings treats to the dog at her barn and at her friends house. Tara loves dogs.

I, on the other hand, didn't grow up with dogs. I sneeze when they are around. I have no desire to wake up in the morning with walking the dog as my first thought. I like the freedom you have with cats; dogs require more forethought into your day's activities.

Tara likes dogs that need exercise, love to be around people and look pretty. I like dogs that are lazy, obedient and don't smell. We didn't get asked about dog breed preference in our pre-marriage counseling.

Last month Tara got in contact with an Afghan Hound breeder outside of Orangeville (Candyland Afghans). The breeder thought that she just might have a dog that would fit us both. After many long talks and a brief meet-n-greet, we decided to get him for a 3 week trial. I present to you Seamus:

Seamus is a 10 month old Afghan Hound (wikipedia link). He was going to be one of the breeder's studs but deveoped some confirmation traits that preclude him from winning in the ring. He's really hairy. He's a bit whinny. But he is house-broken and he mostly heels. He doesn't really like to fetch but he does like to run around like his tail is on fire (which is fun to watch).

If we continue to like him and if our cats start liking him he will be ours at the end of the 3 weeks. If not then it's back to the drawing board.

We picked Seamus up on Friday. Saturday we took him to the barn. Below are a few snapshots:
 

Wish us luck.

Camera update

Quick update on the camera situation. Black's eventually replaced my camera after some arm twisting and forceful reading of my warranty in the store. Surprisingly they found another D70s in their warehouse somewhere; while I was hoping for an upgrade, I'm just happy that I have a camera that works.

Lessons I've learned:
1. Keep all your documentation in one place. They asked for it often.
2. Keep on top of the store personnel - they already have your money and don't have much intensive to work in your favor.
3. As much as a pain as it was, buying the extended warranty was worth it for me. For $50 I got three trips to Nikon and then a replacement.

Photography with an end result in mind

Warning: this is a photography post. Tldr: I talk about the process of going from a vision to a print. If you want to see a pretty picture of mine, scroll to the end.

Photography is fun. With a few hundred dollars you can get yourself a nice kit that lets you take some great photos. It's exciting to walk around, take photos and get a few good ones. In the beginning you feel lucky when you capture a great image. If you are bitten by the photography bug, you want to keep your camera on you at all times and you are eager to share your photographs with your friends. The next stage moves from a reactive motivation to a proactive motivation. This is where you seek out or pose your environment for a greater chance of getting a great photo. You travel to fun locations or you starting telling your spouse or friend to pose just like so. This is also a fun stage. This is the stage I'm firmly set in.

But also I'm trying to move forward, past begin reactive to my environment and past setting up my environment for maximum chance of getting a good photo. Now I'm trying to pre-visualize specific photographs I want and then going out and making it happen. I'm not doing it all the time because, frankly, it's a lot more work with a lot less results that meet your expectations¹.

With that in mind, I took advantage of some flowers I got Tara to celebrate the fact that she had only seven and a half weeks of clinics left. The vision I had in my head was a triptych of monochrome closeups of the flowers. I wanted something with detail. More realism, less impressionism. Something with an 'art' quality to it. Not art as an highfalutin ideal, but art as in a piece of art; something I could make presentable and something I would want to hang on the wall. After a hour or so with my macro lens and my trusty D70s (which still don't have back yet), I had some good source material. And after another 2 or 3 hours of processing and editing, I had something I liked.

I got my photo printed at Black's. In Kitchener-Waterloo, we are lacking a high quality developing and printing lab (if I'm wrong and there is one hidden somewhere in town, please let me know). The last good one was Heer's in downtown Kitchener, but they folded a few years ago. So I went to Blacks to get it printed. Instead of me just handing them my CD, they made me sit down at one of the printing kiosks and submit the the photo from there (lame, really - if you know if a lab and printers in town, please let me know). A week later, I got an email from the lab that was printing my file. They couldn't open the TIFF I had uploaded from the kiosk. The file opened just fine at the kiosk, so I don't know what happened. After converting the TIFF to a JPG and emailing to the lab, things were on track. The print arrived a few days after that and it looks pretty good if I do say so myself. It's printed on Black's Pearl paper at 12" x 24".

Finding a frame was another fiasco. I had no idea framing was so expensive. The three quotes I got hovered around the $175 mark for a frame in the size I needed. My lovely wife suggested I look for an existing frame and print and just get a new mat. A $40 frame from HomeSense and a $30 mat from a nearby framing shop and I was all set. It did take me a couple of hours to remove the old print from the frame and to mount my photo properly and without dust and cat hair, but my time is pretty much free.

So here is the final product. I'm happy with it. It matches the image I had in my head early on and it's something I feel good about putting on my wall. What else could I ask for?

¹ There is one more stage of photography that I want to get to, past the pre-visualization. And that's the stage where my photography moves beyond about being centered on subjects. It's a stage where I can take a photograph that evokes emotion. In my mind, this is the stage a photography moves from being a craft to being an art and producing something that can be called Art. Even though I have rare glimpses, I'm not there yet. No where near there.

Too much to hope for

My camera is back in the shop. Apparently the second time I sent it into Nikon they just sent it back without doing any work; this doesn't 'count' towards my three repairs before they consider the camera a lemon.

Hopefully my camera comes back in one piece or they decide to give me a new one; my extended warrenty runs out on the March 31.

The Blacks manager said that the repair could take anywhere from 6-8 weeks although last time I got my camera back in 3. I guess I'll be shooting film or borrowing Tara's camera until then...

It's like deja vu all over again

Boooo!

I was taking some photos this afternoon (for a blog post about me deciding to get in shape) and between frames, the viewfinder in my camera got really dim. At first I thought I had something on my glasses, but a quick examination of the camera and lens indicated that the camera was no longer controlling the aperture of the camera. And since the aperture blades have a tiny little spring to help the camera close them, they stayed closed on the camera.  This in-effect, makes the camera useless on all of my newer lenses (which don't have a manual aperture control).

Boooo!

This is the third time I've had to take the camera in to the shop for repair (1st, 2nd, 3rd). I bought the extended warranty which means Blacks should replace my camera this time; I'm heading in tomorrow to talk to the manager. I'm hoping I don't have to go through the whole rigmarole of sending it in to warranty again, but given Blacks' track record, I'm not holding on to more than a sliver of hope.

Boooo!