Eighteen years of walking the same parcel of land, even a parcel as large as sixteen hundred acres, results in a particular sort of casual mindlessness. Not really a taking for granted but more of a forgetting that whatever habitat one lives in is extraordinary because you get to live in it.
Living a life with livestock and dogs means travel to different places is an option not often open to me. As a result I’ve learned to take photos right where I am.
But to see to the same place anew time and time again requires a willingness to lift one’s head and look up and look out. The camera and the dogs help me do just that.
More specifically of late is the craving I seem to have for capturing photographs of the dogs amidst the prairie, in particular, on the prairie trails that crisscross this place or the one gravel road leading in and out of here. My aim is for the images to be more about mood and less about a particular dog so some distance between subject and viewer is required. It is far tougher than it looks to capture such an image since the moment I stop forward movement all the dogs take notice and look back or return to my general vicinity. But I enjoy trying, so much so that I started a new photo collection of these images (under the photography tab) which I'll add and remove photos from as I get better at capturing what it is I am after.
