This week's theme is "Year of the Dog" to coincide with the Chinese New Year...."The Dog is the eleventh of all zodiac animals. According to one myth, the Jade Emperor said the order would be decided by the order in which they arrived to his party. Monkey, Rooster and Dog were in another country, helping a god defeat evil spirits. After, they set off to the party together. Because they arrived at the same time, the Jade Emperor went by the order they met the god in the other country. Thus, Dog became eleventh." Info from the website Chinese New Year 2018: https://chinesenewyear2018.com/zodiac/dog/

This past weekend Jim and I had an opportunity to push our pet photography into a new realm of "extreme action" - we went to visit a dog disc competition.  This blog post is including just a few of the photographs from that event - at the time of this writing, I'm still working to get this down to a manageable number of photographs.  This event (we went on Sunday) was the USDDN Qualifier hosted by Central Florida Dog & Disc Club in Spring Hill, Florida at Veterans Memorial Park.  These dogs were fantastic performers on a warm Sunday.

The events consisted of several rounds of "freestyle" where the dogs did amazing things with their owners - I've never seen anything like it - next time I will try to capture some video of freestyle as photographs just won't do it justice.  The other rounds consisted of the handler throwing the dog disc (looks like a frisbee) and the dog running to catch it (or at least retrieve it).  Above is a photograph of the dog after it has retrieved the disc.

This is a cattle hound dog mix.  It's not all the Aussie's and Border Collies that are doing this!  I did find that many of these dogs were pulled from shelters and rescued into a life they seem to love with all the exercise.  A perfect fit for the very active dogs to allow them run time and have such a strong bond with their handlers.

And here's one of the catch - up in the air!

More photographs will be posted in the gallery for this event, click here http://www.vpshoots.com/centralfloridadogdisc. 

For more 'Year of the Dog' pet photographs head over to visit Nancy Kieffer Photography serving Central New York, the Adirondacks and beyond and then head around the rest of the blog circle.

If you would like to book a custom pet portrait session, send an email to [email protected] or give us a call/text at 813-610-2671 in the Tampa Bay area (Florida).