Category: Max

labraday #3

whbeebe
Bookends

We continue on with my photos of Max and Ruby. The two at this point in their lives were a tight pair. They played together, they ate together, they went on walks together, and they slept together. For example, in the photo above, Ruby is on the left and Max is on the right. At this point Ruby is nine months old and Max is 8 1/2. That sofa has long since gone the way of all flesh, but while it was around it was their sofa, not the humans.

I shot this hand-held with my E-3. I was sitting down in the other room and had both elbows braced, then carefully breathed out while I tripped the shutter. It’s still not as sharp as it would have been had I mounted my E-3 on a tripod, but sometimes you don’t have the luxury of time to fully set up before a shot.

This photo also underscores (for me at least) the importance of the in-body image stabilization of the E-3. This shot might be soft, but it would have been blurrycam-tastic if I had tried this with my E-300 body. That and the fact that shooting ISO 800 with the E-300 would have been a lot noisier.

Profiles

Here we are two years later in 2011. Max on the left and Ruby on the right. There was a dog park we would take them too on weekends, and there were plenty of water fountains around the parking lot. I would grab one of our chrome steel water bowls, fill it up for them, and then just let them drink as much as they wanted. That’s why you see all the drool and water down the side of the Prius door. It’s been years since a visit to any dog park or area where owners gather with their dogs; first the pandemic pretty much ended that, and now there’s the fear of our dogs catching canine influenza. So I keep everyone at home.

Taken with my E-3 and the wonderful Digital Zuiko 50-200mm.

Morning has Broken

Probably one of my favorite of the pair at this point in their lives. One of my daughters had come home in December of that year from college, and slept out in the back porch room on that sofa. When she got up to go to the bathroom, the two gremlins settled right on in her place. This was taken with my Olympus E-P2 and the plastic fantastic M.Zuiko 17mm/2.8. I used the in-camera sepia effect. It was just the right combination of morning light to get a lot of detail and broad mid-tones in the photo. And of course, the classic poses of those two.

labraday #2

whbeebe
Ruby Tuesday cleans Peter Max’s right ear

I continue with my look backward into my photo collection of Labrador Retriever photographs. These photos go back to late 2008 to early 2009. This is when Ruby Tuesday (Ruby) was still just a little female, while her older companion, Peter Max (Max) was the alpha of the house. At that time we “only” had three cats.

There is a sweet period when a younger dog is brought in as a companion with an older that they both stick together like two peas in a pod. The eat together, they sleep together (see above) and then explore the world together (below). They even travel together as was illustrated in last Saturday’s Labraday entry.

I’m especially drawn to the photo above, because of the serious look on little Ruby’s face, and the way that they’re both looking as if they’re checking the property and covering each other’s backs. Max left us nearly nine years ago, and Ruby, who had her fifteenth birthday last August, is now as big as Max, but still chuggin’ along. Although you can’t actually tell in that photo, Max is of American Lab stock while Ruby is English.

All of these photos were taken during my Olympus E-300 camera period. That was the only camera I owned at the time, a kit system that I purchased from NewEgg in 2006 that included a 14-45mm and 40-150mm Digital Zuiko zooms. Those were the original models, before Olympus started to redesign them to reduce material in the zooms, and the cost to manufacture for them. All of that is gone now, but I still fondly remember them.

And it should go without saying I really miss Max.

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