Puppy Love Tournament

This last Saturday I was fortunate enough to go shoot the Puppy Love Flyball Tournament in Gridley California. This event was hosted by the cool flyers at Gold Coast Flyers. As some of you know I love dog sports so this was a treat to shoot. It also turns out my shot list from Dog Fancy this month includes dog sports so it was a double bonus. Unfortunately, I had some slight unforeseen events take place on Sunday so I wasn't able to make it for the close of the tournament. This event definitely stretched my skills as a photographer. If you would like to know some of the technical details of shooting this, I will provide below.

For the teams that were there:

If you would like photos of your pups. I generally charge about $5 a photo if you are only interested in a few. What I would like to do though, is extend a discount if you buy the full CD. If you have 10 or more photos, you can purchase them all for $40, if you have less than 10 photos in your set, you can purchase them for $20. The CD will include the high-res photos with rights released to your team for any use you may like. If you would like to order a CD then just E-mail me at InvisibleAttributes@gmail.com.

View Photos HERE.

One more quick note, If you mention the Puppy Love tournament, you can receive %10 off a portrait session for your pup.







-Technical Notes:
So, this one was a nice challenge to shoot. I was facing very, very low lighting (for good action shots anyway). Daylight, tungsten and halogen lights to try to white balance to and on top of all that these dogs move very, very, fast.
If these were humans jumping over small hurdles for tennis balls, I would have just popped out my flash and did some creative lighting. One of my number one rules with shooting groups of dogs though is never use a flash. Some dogs hate it and get scared and run away. Since I couldn't use a flash, I had to use full ambient light (which I mentioned wasnt good at all). What I had to end up doing was putting my 50mm 1.8 (yup, a 1.8. That made capturing those dogs in that shallow depth of field really difficult). Then I had to set my ISO at 1600-2000 (you heard me) and my shutter speed to about 300. That is what it took to capture enough light in the place to TRY to freeze the dogs in place enough to get some detail. Yeah, crazy huh.