A Little Muddy

Park Lake is officially no longer frozen.  There are still some sections of ice, but it is mainly open water now.  It must still be freezing, but there was no stopping Coulee today.  The more she ran, the dirtier she got until I think she literally turned into a Lake Monster.

Feeling Owly

Last weekend I visited a friend and we went off owl hunting.  We found two snowy owls sitting on top of fence posts.  It was snowing and the sky was grey (I'm trying not to think about how cool these would have been on a bright blue sky day) and it made it hard to focus on the owl at times, especially the super white one.  I may just need to do this again soon!

Bath Time

Despite the amount of crap my dogs get into, they don't get a lot of baths.  There isn't really much point if they are going to go out again the next day and do it all over again.  Most of it just falls off them when they dry and if they have rolled in something particularly stinky they usually get a quick "spot bath".

But the other day, Lacey was covered in mud AND we had a new shampoo to try out that Judy bought us.  So poor, poor Lacey got to hop in the tub.

Even before I got started she was hoping to get out.

Oh the misery.  

Notice how she won't even look at me?

Please just end the torture!

I couldn't resist a towel shot either.  :)

It is nice to have a good smelling dog if only for a day!

The Beat Down

Going for a walk without a toy for Coulee has it's pros and cons.

The Pros include: she actually sniffs around her environment and goes exploring (this can also be a con if she finds yucky stuff), she is usually more calm and relaxed and it is a nice change of pace.

The Cons include: she doesn't get nearly as much exercises and often in the evening acts as if she didn't get any exercise at all and she usually turns Lacey into her personal squeaky toy.

Fortunately for Lacey that only lasted for a few minutes the other day until I could settle things down.  The problem usually starts when Lacey gets the zoomies and Coulee can't resist the chase.

The problem is when Lacey stops and it turns into this....

Sometimes Lacey can hold her own, but it isn't very often.

And unfortunately for Lacey the repeated beat downs resulted in a very dirty pup. Stay tuned for her resulting bath photos.  :)

Jack Sprat

I can't believe it has been a year!  Crazy.   Happy Gotcha Day Spratly!

Secret Weapon

Coulee and I are going to start doing a Rally Obedience class tomorrow night.  It has been years since we've done a class together.  I think it will go OK, but when I think back to her younger years at training classes, all I can remember is a wild child who wouldn't sit still and wait for her turn.  We used to practice endless sits, downs, high fives, etc. while waiting for the other dogs to go because she just couldn't settle and wait patiently.  I couldn't watch any of the other students, or listen to what the instructors were saying because I had to focus on keeping her busy.  We finally started bringing a crate to class so she could sit in there when it wasn't her turn and that made thing so much better.  Unfortunately I don't think this is that kind of class but I'm pretty sure she has matured passed all that.  Fingers crossed.

Rally is essentially a lot of heeling and basic obedience commands.  Coulee is pretty good at the commands, not so good at the heeling as we never practice it.  But I have a secret weapon that I can fit in my pocket. I just need to flash it once and I have Coulee's undying attention and she will not stray from my side. It is even powerful enough to get two dogs to heel side by side without me even saying a word.

Cuz, I think I love you.

Before and After

So I got a few questions about the silhouettes so I thought I'd show the before and afters.  I just figured this out by playing around so there may be a better way out there, but this works for me.

Not sure how well you can see the settings in these screen captures but I'll write out the important bits.

For Coulee below, I had my camera at ISO 100, F/2.8 and 1/8000 shutter speed.  I wanted to under expose her and the ground.  As the day was overcast and not super bright, I also ended up under exposing the sky.  So in editing, I cranked up the brightness and the blacks.  I also reduced the saturation just to get rid of the little bit of colour that was left.  And that was it for this one.

I went out today with Constance and Paisley. The ground was lighter due to a light snowfall and the sky was darker due to thicker cloud cover so we didn't have much contract at all.  For this one the camera settings were - ISO 200, f/3.2 and 1/3200 shutter.  I'm not sure if this is what they should have been at or not...  I had to crank the exposure, the fill light, the brightness, the contrast and the blacks.  I again decreased the saturation.

I also had to go in a use the paint brush tool to get rid of some black dots in the background.  I just set the brush to the max exposure so it would turn everything it touched white. (The picture below is before I used the brush tool.  See how grey the edge of the photo looks?  I'm not sure if you'll be able to click it big enough, but that is just a whole lot of dots) I also took the exposure brush at the lowest exposure setting and filled in a few light spots on Paisley. Some of her white spots stayed white and needed darkening.

The more severe editing gave the outline a much harder edge but I really like them as well.  The finished images are below.

We didn't think it was working so we didn't play around for very long.  It was also very cold and Paisley's newly groomed feet were not happy with the cold and sharp grasses.  We'll just have to do it again one day soon.