Any time I have my camera in my hand, I am happy. Put me in a field of tulips with a dog and my camera and I am totally in my happy place.

I spent the last two weeks in Oregon visiting my friend and fellow dog photographer Audrey Ricks / Sunsets Unleashed. I planned this trip because of a tulip festival at the Wooden Shoe Farm and on the first morning we took Audrey’s dog Mochi, the white boxer pictured above. Mochi will sit and stay which was great because it gave me a chance to check my settings and take some test shots.

I love photography and I especially love photographing dogs. That doesn’t always mean it’s easy.

I rarely do sunrise or sunset photography. I live in the land of the trees so I don’t have wide open spaces where I can actually see the sun rise or set.

Because I don’t have a ton of experience doing sunrise and sunset photography, I have to really think about what I’m doing.

• How bright is the sun? Is it filtered by clouds or no?

• Where do I want to place the dog in relation to the sun?

• Depending upon where I have the dog in relation to the sun, what should my camera settings be?

• How can I light the dog and still have detail in the sky (so that it’s not totally white?)

• If I’m using flash, how does that affect all of the above?

When doing sunrise or sunset photography, I need to use a flash to light up the dog. Since I traveled from NC to Oregon, I didn’t have my strobes with me. This is the first time I’ve traveled without them but I wasn’t sure how much I’d use them and I wanted to lighten my load as much as possible.

Strobes are more powerful than flash and I quickly learned that I really could’ve used my strobes.

On the first morning, we had a light cloud cover. My flash worked fine under these conditions. But later that morning, the wind kicked up and all of the clouds disappeared. Every shoot we had after this very first one was under bright blue skies and no clouds at all.

I think the locals were loving the Southern California type weather. I on the other hand, really wanted more typical PNW weather: some clouds would’ve been nice.

Other than our photo shoot on the very first morning, my photos have more harsh light than I would prefer but we had to go with what the weather gave us. I am grateful that we didn’t get rained out every day which would’ve been more typical PNW weather.

In the photo at the top of the page of Mochi the white boxer, I used my flash. Since the sun is rising behind Mochi, I needed flash to throw some light on the front of her. The smaller photo of her is the “sooc” photo - straight out of the camera.

I literally didn’t do anything to it. There are no lightroom edits, I didn’t even straighten it.

Here’s a random fact about me (and it’s a pita for me): I rarely take a straight photo. Almost every photo I take has to be straightened. That is painfully obviously when you have the horizon in the photo as you can see in the sooc shot.

The 2nd thing that made these photos shoots challenging is photographing different sized dogs in the tulip fields.

I’ve never photographed dogs in tulip fields before and for these I definitely had to consider the size of the dog.

See the next two photos for examples of this. LOL

Photographing a tiny poodle mix and a giant Irish wolfhound in tulip fields required very different thinking.

The two dog photos below show how I placed the dog near the flowers and Audrey took the behind the scenes photos I included.

The one laying down is Summit. He was recently rescued and he had trouble standing so most of his photos are of him laying down. As a dog photographer, you have to go with what works best for the dog. The next dog is Rocky, a senior pitbull living his best live in the PNW.

Photographing dogs in the middle of these tulip fields was definitely my happy place. I’ll remember this trip forever. I love the west coast and I am so grateful to be back here photographing dogs and hanging out with my friend Audrey.

This is a blog circle and our topic this week is happy. If you click the link at the end of each blog post, you’ll read each dog photographer’s post about the topic. I am guessing there will be lots of action photos of dogs having fun but I thought I’d go in a different direction and show everyone what makes me happy these days.

Next up is Tracy Allard of Penny Whistle Photography fetching pet and family portraits in Coppell, Carrollton and the greater Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex. Happy reading!