photo ops and reshoots

After Starbuck's passing, I tried to sort through all of his pictures - compiling them with some sense of order, scanning those that pre-dated our first digital camera. Just looking at the file names - from MVC* to DSC* to P* to L* - the Buckster outlasted many a camera in their race toward higher resolution. Today, I gawked at a friend's Nikon D90 and its pictures, reminded again of how far digital technology has come.

It took a long time to catalog the pictures as, invariably, I was sidetracked by the memories that were embedded in those pictures, each coming to life upon sight. It's a cliché, but true, that "a picture is worth a thousand words" and the words stitch together the spaces between the photographs. Those spaces were often more cherished than the photographs themselves but the photographs help us to find the words.

In the Buckster's case, a good photograph was hard to come by. Unless he was sleeping, there was rarely a moment when he was absolutely still. The picture attached to this post was taken one Christmas, after the typical present opening. Here he is with his dog biscuit shaped like dim sum, a Chinese breakfast/lunch dumpling. Starbuck was always overjoyed when he got a new, never-before-seen treat, incapable of hiding his emotions; he would give Snuffles the Dog a run for his money.

As a result, there are many pictures like this: a stationary treat and a blurry dog head. Some only have the treat, as by the time the shutter activated, he rolled out of the frame. And, others still only have his tail, if he decided to usher the treat to a place safe from paparazzi.

In future posts, I'd like to upload photographs like this, that express the multitude of raw emotions dogs share with us, though many more can be found between the stitches.