Yes, Rom is Far Field Remoulade, a Louisiana boy and Princess Liliana is a rescue from a mad Russian woman breeder...she is the smaller and he has the sable highlights. He has nothing but champion and grand champion in his breeding on both sides as far back as it goes...he is the real deal, as good as it gets in the top 5% in north america for the breed. Rom and Lili, my intelligent, wide ranging pals. they are each just past five years of age and she is an example of one russian standard and he of the more heavily furred western standard.

(Download)


(Download)

Punctuation matters it seems. Shot in Buena Vista, Va. earlier this week while I was laughing and not stopping at this station to fill up with gas.

(Download)

A p.s. these are pretty large dogs. Far Field Remoulade, the male named Rom, is 88" long from tail tip to nose....anything but little. Fab. athletes too. They did get to meet in real life there a working cattle horse and pony for their first ever meeting with a horse when the owner liked the dogs and said, get 'em out and let's see how they like my horses who are used to it. She was meeting her vet there as she lived on the other side of the mountain.

(Download)

thanks for the comment. No, this is my Nikon D4 and it was only those few at that time and condition, not any other images captured that day. Remove it? Are you kidding? As natural light I'd never remove such an unusual phenomenon...not unlike what people describe as the green flash at sundown in Key West...

LOL...No, the dogs came with me. They are my buddies. The Virginia Horse Center is enormous and has a multipurpose outdoor ring where they can do the kind of jumps you see in the Olympics and indoor rings for dressage and I think this weekend they have barrel racing. they do have trail competitive facilities and schooling grounds as well. One of the premier facilities on the east coast where every top competitive rider goes at times. They must have barn space for 200 horses there and many, many buildings for various purposes...from here north to Loudon County in Virginia is not only the "former" moonshine country but iot is the horse country for the rich and famous as well. Out in the boonies where the road got very small I saw this cold water drain someone had decorated and photographed it then got the heck out of there...it could have been the drain for cooling water on someone's still. Every time the ABC raises liquor prices the amount of sugar consumed in these western Va. counties goes way up....we can all do that math. It got so remote back there and so alone the road went from two lane paved to one with no shoulders 50' above the creek and two dirt ruts and that's when I turned the big expedition around at the widest spot, very carefully, and went home. It is gorgeous out there. My smugmug site has about 400 images of the trip where we also hiked a short length of the Appalachian trail and this is my big champion quality male, Rom, cooling his heels in Otter Creek as well.

(Download)


(Download)


(Download)

My dogs and I with Nikon D4 left at dawn from our hotel and followed small roads into the foothills of the Western side of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in this case rte 603 which is Irish Creek road that follows Irish Creek. The mountains are mostly granite so farming is usually raising dairy or beef cattle on small patches of flat ground where soil has settled enough to grow grass or hay at the bottom of the ridges where the creeks run as this was when the sun was up but not yet over the mountains enough to fully light or burn off the fog when I shot this with the D4 at 1/500th and iso 250 and when post processing discovered these shots had not the white of normal fog or the sometimes bluish mist of the Blue Ridge but a greenish tint. It is the photo of the trip and my dogs did not notice nor did I until post was started. I cropped and adjusted contrast so maybe the contrast accentuated the color that was there that morning as it was not that green to my eyes. None the less, it is probably the most unusual photo I've ever taken with natural light...weird and beautiful some friends have said so I share. Ever encountered such a thing? No filters on camera, and no post tricks to change the hue, just crop and contrast adjustment. The other photo is the next morning from the spine of the Blue Ridge on the Parkway going north to Waynsboro then home to Chester, va. and the last is my dogs and hotel life after each days journeys and how they felt about getting in and out of the suv many times a day. Yes, we had to share the double beds....these are big dogs, Borzoi show dogs. In case you are wondering, yes, this is moonshine country still...Rockbridge County Virginia...we stayed near the excellent Virginia Horse Center facility in Lexington tho no horses were there mid week. It runs events on the weekends generally.

(Download)


(Download)


(Download)


(Download)

lots of those Maine lighthouses like the one at Portland, etc have been done to death. Nice image but my first reaction was it very much gets the perspective wrong...the lighthouse is an afterthought visually to the granite rocks in foreground. Perhaps a different perspective might have been to shoot very shallow depth of field with center focus on the lighthouse itself and let the sea and rocks be more gauzy, less in sharp focus so the lighthouse stands out while in the environment of the sea which is what causes it to be there. Just a thought for an alternate treatment. very clear image and I'm just musing about the effect of how the composition is treated.

Today you can find flowers like these in nature shot from a dozen feet away at the entrance to Henricus, the second official city in colonial Virgina, at the 800 acre nature area. I shot them with a sony a7 adapted manually to a canon 85-300mm fd film lens plus a 2x extender and got this sort of gauzy, impressionistic result which I find pleasing and pleasant to look at...good colors and a shot I really like. The 2x extender really shortens depth of field which is what gives these real flowers such a gauzy feel. I've shot that same clump of flowers without the 2x and gotten good, crisp results but I like this much better.

Then I took a shot of natures smelly and beautiful vine with its flowers making an old chain link, weathered fence, look a whole lot better as well down the road half a mile further on. Not nearly as nice a photo but I liked the contrast between the beauty of nature and the old fence.

Fun days when you shoot flowers like these then find a Honeysuckle vine livening up your nose and your eyes....and you see some of the vignetting I guess you'd call it of the big lens shot from 15' away manually....the 2x drops two f stops of light out and unless you start with an f 2.8 lens it limits light and I get more of this effect. Never used a tele extender before but they have their place even if limited.

Your uses, experience with 1.4 or 2 x telextenders?

(Download)


(Download)

He was at a pond at Berkeley colonial plantation and was kind enough to pose for me while I was parked in the Tahoe shooting out the window with two big Borzoi quiet in the back also watching him.He had stepped back from the water's edge and was walking around a bit in the taller grasses but always a couple feet or less from the pond's waters. shot with 300mm handheld. I'm not the steadiest or greatest wildlife shooter but on my high resolution tablet the first one shows up pretty well.

I wanted him to fly but he did not oblige and so we eventually left. I wanted a flight photo of his take off but models in the wild rarely cooperate at least with me......

(Download)


(Download)

I thought it was post war but am not a knowledgeable fan. The left front fender has two little dings in it which were left in place. The motors were tiny but you can see the guy with his hat in it driving it in your mind. I have a 1976 red Corvette and a 1991 ZR-1 Corvette for my old sports cars. Different eras and speeds, engineering. The ones I thought were cool in college in the 1960's were the Triumphs, tr2, 3 and the Austin Healey 3,000 I think they were. I would still kill to own a 1969 Jag XKE restored like this one...but I'm about two hundred grand short....I'll post in a second.

First three are just gorgeous!

Turned a corner out in the country to go north over the Harrison bridge and there sat this completely untended MG so I shot it with my Sony A7 and Canon fd 80-300mm manual lens. Later, when I returned there were two men poring over some kind of manual at it...repair manual to get it going again?

None the less this old MG sure looked to be in good shape, tiny motor and all!

Not something you see every day.

(Download)


(Download)


(Download)

When gravity gets to be too much...sony A7 with adapter to canon 80 to 300 zoom...hand held

(Download)

Others do better than I do on animal photography but I'm mastering a canon 85-300 via adapter shooting it manually on a sony A7 body so have had a similar learning curve. I do have a nikon d4 as well but love the a7 as an art camera. One thing you can try is run the iso up a little and increase the shutter speed. It will minimize your variation in movement when the shutter is stroked. A faster shot allows for less time for your "hold" to move. A solid monopod can be good. I find I make a triangle between the eye viewfinder, my two hands and it is a sort of steady enough tripod and I don't breath when I shoot. The other thing which hurt my heart to do was to use a combination of manual settings and one of the white light scene type settings and sometimes the creative settings as well. The things together can make a difference. First: cloudy, sunny, etc. settings. Second: Standard, deep, vivid, landscape, etc. creative scene type. I used to think all manual was better but a combo of them can exceed anything that manual does by itself. the landscape if you are shooting way out is helpful as it sets up background better. Not sure how all this works but it does seem to. Also, I try not to punch the shutter release..easier said than done but distance means ANY vibration and it fuzzes the shot to some degree. You may know all this but the above is what I learned while getting a whole lot better at it.

Nicely done on the photographs