Border Collies are different from big horses. They are smaller, smarter I think, more restless and much more crazy. It is never easy to photograph them (or most dogs) because they don’t like to make eye contact with anything but sheep and they are always moving, onto the next thing, looking ahead, waiting to work.

Horses are easy to photograph, they love to work, but they also love to stand around, looking grave and contemplative, with their heads down and their legs cocked. Border collies do not like to stand around looking contemplative, they never put their heads down or cock their hind legs.

I have been taking photos of border collies for years now, and I have learned some things about it. I’ll share some of them.

– When I feed border collies, I often put my camera down on the floor next to their food bowl, so they associate the camera with eating, a good thing. When I take Red out to work the sheep, I hold the camera out to him next to the gate and let him see it, then I open the gate. When he sees the camera, he looks at it, he gets excited, he associates it with work, the one thing every border collie truly cares about.

– The best way to photograph a border collie is to lie down between him (or her) and the sheep and point the camera at his eyes. They will be staring at the sheep. Red does not even see the camera when he is working, nor does he care about it.

The other thing to do is be alert, and I am getting old enough that it is hard to be as alert as a border collie, there is no easier way to feel old than to try and keep up with them. For days, I’ve had this idea of photographing Red behind the cornstalks in the nearby field, it just came to me one day and I got obsessed with it. But how to do it?

Red rarely is still and almost never looks at the camera away from sheep. I walked out into the cornfield and told him to lie down, which he did, and to stay, which is almost always does. As luck would have it, something ahead caught his eye I think it was the sun reflecting off of a big milk truck.  Red got that look, I dropped down onto the ground in the mud and pointed the camera.

History is unlikely to record this photograph, it will surely not be hanging in any museum or be analyzed in one of those glossy photo books. But it still has a story, and has a meaning, I like the juxtaposition of the cornstalk and the working dog, that sets up a feeling. I like that Bedlam Farm is right in the background, that gives it more emotion for me.

Photographing dogs is fascinating, I love it. Oh yes, expensive lenses help too. The farther away you can get, the better the shots you are likely to get.