It turns out it’s not so easy to get good actions shots of dogs at play, especially when those dogs are a border collie and a blue heeler, who both move extremely fast! But, I did manage to get a couple decent pictures out of the many I had to sift through.
This particular adventure started one beautiful late September evening, as my friend Chase and I took a quick hike up Beehive Basin, near his apartment in Big Sky, when I was still camping in Montana. We wanted to take the dogs for a hike, but they were far more interested in playing, which they did for almost the entire hike...
But what better place for a dog to play, then the great Montana outdoors, where there is endless space to run, and plenty of interesting smells to follow when all the running around tires them out, which it never did. For these two have seemingly limitless energy at this young age. And for us humans, the views were spectacular up there, and the playing pups a good source of entertainment.
Occasionally they’d stop and look at us, like they wondered why we were so interested in their games...
And then they’d go right back to playing again, moving so fast it was near impossible to get any good still shots, which made my task more challenging, but I finally felt like I had succeeded, getting at least a few worthy photos I thought.
They don’t really do the dogs justice, and next time I’ll remember to take a video, from which any screenshots one likes can be captured and made into a still shot.
The dogs made perfect playmates for each other, pretty even matches on the ‘playground’. Dakota, my border collie about 1.5 years old, and Whalen, the eight month old heeler, sure had some fun times the few times they were able to hang out. Dogs, they sure are a lot of fun.
The only downside to the camping lifestyle for Dakota is a lack of doggie friends to play with, but she has made a few friends along the way, and especially enjoyed her time with Nukka, a German Shepherd pup we met in Arizona last December, camped out not far from our camp at the base of the Dragoon mountains for almost the entire two weeks we were there. Nukka and her family were from Bozeman, Montana too, crazy that our paths crossed all the way down in Arizona!
Those two sure did have fun though, until it was time to move on once again.
A dog’s life sure looks like fun, especially when you get to spend the majority of your life free to explore the great outdoors. Sure is a better life than most dogs get, stuck at home eight hours every day on most days. I don’t think Dakota realizes just what a lucky dog she is. She just always wants another dog to play with, but still pretty happy.
Personally the best way I found is just keep hitting the shutter button and hope for the best. You never know what cool photo you can get I just by chance as you are capturing all this motion.
out of a set of six I did get one really good picture so I am actually head of the curve today
Thanks for the tip, I was using IPhone for those so couldn’t do that, although I have settings I could have used but had them turned off and didn’t think to enable them, silly me :)
Oh, yours is such a cutie! German shepherd, it looks like? How old is he (or she)? Looks super young still. Enjoy their time as puppies, they grow up way too fast! It seems like just yesterday I was picking mine up at 9 weeks old in the middle of a crazy blizzard, and now she’s almost two years...
Thank you my German Shepherd purebred puppies is 10 weeks old and a complete handful. Super smart and already listening to commands.
So yeah I generally take off the flash so I can just click click click click click and get a series of pictures and then review them later.
Puppy dog is pretty amazing so..... Yeah I definitely need to start posting more pictures of him. Besides getting him his own account...