~*Shell*~

That's brilliant!

Gremlins

A beagle as a demo dog? I'll believe it when i see it. I have it on good authority that they're untrainable like sibes Bec!! *is jealous* When's the next Sydney weekend workshop Steve?

This is just gorgeous!! They look like they have the same expression on their faces.

The 1000D is a great camera to learn on - it wasn't out when i got my 450d. I would love to see how it performs with some fantastic lenses on it!

Wylie is sooooo cute - i think you need a signature on your posts that have your shibas in it!! There aren't enough shibas on DOL.

He's mid-yawn - his eyes get the bug eyed look and i just happened to capture it. See what I mean about the posed portraits? His unposed ones are more like his personality than anything i can capture posed so I tend to like them better. I think it takes a very very good photographer (have a look at Ashanali's and Ruthless's stuff - though there are an insane amount of good photographers on this site!) to capture a good portrait when it's posed. I've only had my slr (i have a 450d) for about 18 months - my only advice is to learn what iso, shutter speed and aperture are. They're confusing but once you know what they are, putting your camera on manual is a lot less daunting!! After that, i think it's all practice. Your portraits in the november challenge are great. I'm sure you'll be able to capture stunning photos of your dogs without a problem!

Lol - yep! No... freakin'... way Crazy eyes

Gosh Rocco - if my photos were half as good as yours, I would be very very happy!! They're gorgeous! Here are a few of mine - Ben (my nephew): The whirlwind that is my niece, Rachel: I've been working on these for my brother for christmas - Jonas: MJ:

JS's tips are fantastic! The best thing to do though is to just try and see what works. I find I like my photos of Zero better when he's doing something he likes or when we're having fun. Posing him in photos very rarely works and he tends to dig at any drop sheets I put down so i can get a "studio" shot. This is probably my favourite photo of Zero - it was taken when i woke him up when he was sleeping in the garden: It's not professional or anything but it's very Zero. Here's a posed shot for comparison. I think the colouring is pretty and Zero has a cute expression on his face but i didn't have fun taking this photo because i was sore (a couple of days off crutches) and Zero was uncooperative: ETA: I should add that I don't think Zero had much fun when we took the second photo either. I was slow on my feet and wouldn't let him have any fun.

Aimee - can you send them through to me one by one please? It looks like your email is squishing them before sending. I'm still only getting shots that are like 33k...

Lenses have an international warranty on them - camera bodies do not. If I was you i would buy the camera body here at least. The twin lens kit is a great way to start learning - the lenses aren't great but they'll do you until you've learnt quite a lot. When you realise your lenses aren't going to get the shot you want to take, you know it's time to upgrade. I have a few lenses on my want list but for the most part, they're more expensive than my camera body.

If I'm brushing Zero out (he's a sibe so his coat is a lot different to your dog!) i'll brush him with the pin brush first to get any knots out of the coat, then if he's blowing coat I'll use the furminator (like the coat king but a little different). If he's not blowing coat, I'll just use a slicker brush after the pin brush to get his coat to shine. If he's right in the middle of blowing coat of if he's just had a bath, i'll line comb him with a metal comb - makes him look great and gets all the dead and loose hair out of his coat. With the english springer spaniel, i would definitely make sure there are no knots in the dog's feathering before you run the coat king through it. The coat king cuts the hair so if it has a knot in it, you could cut more hair out than you intended to and end up with a little bald patch and you might hurt the dog tugging on a knot. When I'm doing my friend's ESS (Seymore is only a puppy though), i'll use a pin brush which gets down to the dog's skin and through the feathering when it's held away from the dog and a slicker brush but so far he hasn't needed his coat thinned out. ETA: Yes, you can use the coat king too much - the same as you can use any brush too much. If you go over and over the same spot you'll irritate the dog's sensitive skin. Hope this helps!

I'll PM you my email address and have a play around with a few for you if you like. Photobucket will have squished the photos so working with the original file will make it look better. It's not a hard edit at all!

Love love love this one - do you have lightroom? If you bring the black levels up just a tiny tiny bit, the wave in the drop sheet behind Ruby will disappear, or failing that you could paint around her with a brush to bring the exposure down (it should have a very similar effect). She's just gorgeous! Those ears and that smile are just to die for!

I agree - there are some gorgeous shots there but at the same time, i'm very disappointed with some of the selections. There isn't one splat shot there that I actually like. I saw some great photos in that brief too.

I heard they were bumping everything back by 5 days to make up for it but that was written early on in the blogs - I haven't had confirmation on it yet. I'm not holding my breath!

I would give him a little bit of time too - just remember, he has been uprooted from his home, his family and everything he knows. It may take him a while to adjust to the fact things work a little differently around your house and he'll definitely have to become accustomed to your dogs. Do you have time to spend some one on one time with him? If he begins to trust you, then he may be more trusting of his environment. You could also try crating him with a bone - making his world a little smaller so he doesn't have to worry about the stress of everything outside the crate may make him feel secure enough to relax a little.

The same happens with me - you have to remember that many people from large Asian cities (china, japan etc) aren't used to seeing big dogs and because of that a lot of them have some fear of dogs. I took Zero to the million paws walk which in sydney is held at olympic park - there were a bunch of tourists standing outside the gates and wanted to take photos with Zero so I put him in a down stay and allowed them but everytime he would shift his weight or move his head they would jump up and run a few feet away. Eventually they understood that he wouldn't hurt them and stopped but it took some time. Just be patient with people and try to show them that your dog isn't something to be feared.

She looks a lot younger with the little razor teeth!!! I'm glad I'm not that tug toy...

I love your shot of Lotus CM! I suppose I should post a few of mine from this month: Mow sleeping on Zero's crate - he likes to rub himself on anything that belongs to the dog so of course, the crate is a massive drawcard for Mow and he loves to sleep on top of it. Terranik's Ahsoka - she's so independent and adventurous but she's a cuddle monster too and gets the most gorgeous expressions on her face. I call this one "See ya later Mum" And just because, one of Zero:

I can't believe how grown up she looks - it's insane!

Hey woofenpup - download the trial version of lightroom. It's insanely good. You can choose to saturate certain areas and desaturate others really easily so in a photo like this it's simple. I had a bit of a play for you. More colouring in her markings around her face and ear, a lot more colour in the eye and then desaturated the red in her ear a little and added a little bit of a vignette:

I sent Zero's off to you but I just wanted to make sure you got it.

And the problem is that whilst you might be able to get a dog comfortable in a certain situation, how do you know that another different situation that you have not yet encountered might provoke an aggressive response. I find that with behaviour whilst outward patterns of execution might be the same, can be somewhat shifting as to triggers. As an example my own dog used to find cars a trigger for prey drive, I don't remember actively working to supress it, maybe I did (well he wasn't allowed off leash), but gradually it moved to speedboats, then to the infamous skateboards. He is great around skateboards now, but would I trust him if I wasn't there no. It's not exactly aggression in this case but when I got Zero he was very fearful - he no longer shows a fear response to anything except for lawnmowers. He is getting better about them but it's slow progress. He is constantly shown things that he had fearful responses to in the past and he has no problem with those things anymore. I would say that he's nearly completely cured of his problem fearfulness. Obviously he is going to have a fearful response to some things in the future (like if someone was to jump out at him, trying to scare him) but in the same way that I don't think you can ever call a dog who bites out of extreme pain aggressive, i don't think he would be called fearful for having those responses. I'm sure his fear of lawnmowers will fix itself over time. He can now sleep on the lawn while the lawnmower is going but he still won't walk past it if he can avoid it. Ask away! I haven't put the theory to the test completely, but I've left him with quite a few people and he hasn't shown the slightest amount of aggression to other dogs with them. I have had a few people walk him around at shows and things like that where there have been a lot of other dogs around and he just acts like he would if I was there. He's also often walked by my family or taken different places by a friend of mine and while he will try other behaviours on with them (like climbing up onto the couch) that he wouldn't try with me, the aggression issue hasn't come up with any of them. I sent him to the groomers a couple of weeks ago and left him there and when I got back, he was playing with 2 standard poodles and a labrador that he'd never met before. You would have seen Zero get lunged at by the ridgeback at the workshop? That's pretty much what he's like now - even when dogs are having bad days (snofyre's gorgeous boy, Magnus was having one the other day) and don't want to have other dogs around them, they don't seem to mind him being around them. Magnus even had a bit of a whinge about Terranik's Jedi being near him. That being said, all of the people I've left him with were "dog people" and know that Zero can be a right bossy little s*** sometimes - I'm not sure what he would be like should i give him to someone who was very insecure about dogs. Then again, someone who wasn't a dog person probably wouldn't take him anywhere. I've found that most of Zero's extreme responses come out when he's been stimulus deprived. For example, if i get home from work late and don't have time to play with him before we go to obedience training and then leave him in his crate for an hour (I'm a trainee instructor so i help take a beginners class for the first hour) and then get him out of his crate for our training session, he tends to come out of his crate absolutely hyper (he makes a noise that's like a growl but it's actually the start of his wooooo noise at a low level - when you hear him "talk" you understand it but for someone who doesn't know how sibes sound, it can come out sounding a little like a growl) and wanting to jump on other dogs but it's not an aggressive move, just that he's suddenly over stimulated. A couple of commands and he calms down again, ready to work and stops paying attention to the other dogs around him. What Nekhbet says about these dogs wanting to change is completely correct - Zero did a 180 in about 8 weeks - he's not an aggressive dog but he felt the need to be aggressive because he didn't know how else to act and aggression had got him somewhere in the past. Zero didn't have the usual upbringing though so it's understandable that he didn't know the right way to act.