A Real Dog of a Summer

The headlines are confirming what none of us in South Central Alaska have missed: It’s been a real dog of a summer. Hardly a true summer at all! But maybe our canine friends can help remind us one can get wet and have a ball at the same time. Yes, indeed!

The news drearily proclaims: we haven’t had a cloudless day since April and yesterday we even broke a record for consecutive days with measurable rainfall.

Sadly I concede the rainy weather had given me the blues. So I woke up Saturday morning on a mission to shake out of and get back to having some fun again!

The tonic for rainy-day blues wasn’t any further away than Spenard Lake. In between capturing a lot of Float Plane phographs, I enjoyed taking a few photos of a local area dog-lover and her two retrievers. Fittingly, just when I was poised for some superp shots it started to rain and obstructed my unshielded lens.

I’ve learned that you can’t be afraid to get dirty if you want a nice photo, and I wanted to get the lens right at the level of the water line. I was in a perfect angle while down on my belly. The dogs were splashing about…

But with the rain and a momentary loss of focus it became one of those, “One that got away” photographic moments. Hopefully I can get another session with the retrievers before the summer is over.

Argggh! Nevertheless I still did get a couple of good images and I’m grateful for the moment. Tomorrow I’ll be posting some of them over at my new photographic site, Big Alaska Photography.