Your dog knows when you’re trying to take its picture.
Nope! Nope! They seem to say: you can’t have that head shot you want. Here’s my butt instead.
Try to take a picture of something else that involves kneeling down, suddenly the dog is intensely curious about what you’re looking at, and is thinking perhaps you are digging up a biscuit or other treat, just for them. So when you want to kneel down low and shoot a bunch of close-ups of some moss, your canine companion helps you out by digging it all up for you.
We’ve now gotten to the point on hikes where if I spot something on the side of the trail, I wait until Birdie has loped up the path a bit before I kneel down to capture a fiddlehead fern just about to unfurl to meet the new season, or a nice little grouping of wild violets. If I linger too long, she comes rushing back to trample on my object of interest, helpfully composting it into the forest floor.
They know what you’re up to. One of my friends had a dog who would leave the room if you pulled out a recognizable camera to take its picture. I managed to capture a picture of him by pulling out my phone, pretending to scroll through it and then snapped a couple of pictures of him when he was wasn’t looking By the second shot, he caught me.
Meanwhile, I have always suspected that I’m constantly being played by Birdie. I don’t have many good shots of her head, and the only one where I got a reasonable expression was last winter on a local hike, I bribed her with a treat to look up at me.
It was a good treat too — chewy and delicious. Rest of the time, can’t keep her attention while also trying to hold the phone and click the shutter button. By the time I get everything lined up, she’s bored with staying put and has wandered off to find something more interesting. Like in this nice portrait of her next to a melting stream.
Can’t complain too much as she isn’t always interested in my pictures. I do manage to get a few nice un-trampled flower shots from time to time.
Aren’t smart phones with fabulous cameras the best? You can shoot a wide-lens view and a close-up using the same device, without having to change lenses. I am not, by any definition, a professional photographer, but a smart phone has enabled me to feel like I could capture the big shot, (many big shots, actually), getting close to what I ultimately want.
New Hampshire field in the fall, 2019
About ten or twelve years ago, during a 2-year hiking frenzy, friends and I would go up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire once or twice a week during the summer, to tackle some of the 48, four-thousand footers, (peaks in that mountain range at or exceeding 4000 feet) and to check them off our list. (For those readers who swear by lists to get you through life, you will understand.) The hikes were exhilarating, the views breathtaking, the colors making me want to tote my pack of paints, brushes and sketch pad up the mountains. But I didn’t take photos during any of these hikes. I simply couldn’t remember to take my camera with me when heading out the door. Mind you, we were leaving our houses at around 4am to get up to the trail heads at an early enough hour so we could hike all day and get back to the cars before nightfall.
Now I mostly hike locally, and have a compact cell phone camera to carry with me to whip out when the perfect scene appears. I have it with me constantly, and take pictures all year long. However, I discovered I love those pictures the most where I’ve gone to the trouble to kneel or lie down to get the shot of small things: easy-to-overlook forest fungi, mosses, berries or a scene from the point of view of my dog.
Puff balls (Basidiomycota) on a log
Anyway, once you shoot the obligatory wide angle scene from the top of a hill, and try to figure out which mountain you’re looking at, how many more pictures of this scene do you really need? One per season, maybe?
View of Pack Monadnock and North Pack Monadnock from Birch Hill in Hollis, NH
Scenes like this makes me breathe easy and forget political squabbles for a while. And there’s always lots of small or close-in things to look at while you’re hiking. I don’t know about you, but once I enjoy the view, then start hiking down, I get to the bottom of the hill before I look around again. (Roots, rocks, acorns, you know…). Can’t see the mountain anymore. But I can spot this:
Old field stone wall overrun with years of forest reclamation
Or this:
Fungi gnawing on a tree
If you don’t want to puff up to the top of a hill the day you’re out in the forest, look about; I mean, really look around at the trail you’re on. Exciting and amazing finds can be had if you just drop to your knees and check out the small stuff or a scene from the point of view of a dog.
Red carpet treatment
I wouldn’t have noticed this shot if I hadn’t had to tie my boot lace.
View from The Pinnacle looking towards Mt. Sunapee, Newbury, NH
Boots crunching up a trail in grainy mid-March snow and ice, whisper of wind in the trees, and my dog chasing enticing scents across the white desert of open forest floor. I love going on winter hikes: so quiet and restorative. My 7 year old dog Birdie and I were following the tracks of other hikers up to the top of The Pinnacle (Barton & Coit/The Pinnacle trails) in Newport, NH. We arrived at the peak and took a break to enjoy the view and to decide where to go next. Do I retrace my steps back to the main trail and head over to take in Coit Mountain? Or do I loop back to the parking lot from The Pinnacle, as there were a bunch of trail branches to explore down-slope from us. Breathing great lungfuls of crisp air, I determined I wanted to cross over the top of The Pinnacle and explore O’Neill or Bear Trap trails on the way down.
I checked my watch: 1:30 pm. Plenty of time. Pulling out my trusty smart phone, (I use an app to locate and load trail maps wherever I happen to be), I saw I wasn’t too far from the trail heading the way I wanted to go. This app includes a handy pointer that works a bit like a direction finder and a bit like a compass. However, I did note that there were no other hikers’ footprints on the trail leading down over the top. It was pristine snow only. The other hikers had all gone back the way they’d come. Heck with it. I’ll find my way — I have the technology, right?
But first, where’s my dog? I scanned the area. Birdie is a mostly black dog and shows up well against white snow. However, tree branches, rock outcroppings and bald patches can make spotting her difficult.
“Birdie, come!” I called loudly. “This way.”
She looked up from where she was digging around and I could see she was already on the trail I wanted to take. Dutifully, she came up to where I was standing and took a treat from my hand.
Birdie racing up to me
“OK, let’s go.” I said
She bounded back to exactly where I had called her from and resumed checking things out. I crunched down the trail to where she was.
“Keep going this way.” I told her.
In general, she doesn’t listen to me when more interesting smells have her full attention, so I slogged past her and ten paces beyond fell to my right thigh in an air pocket. Birdie came up, licked my face and trotted away off-trail.
Fighting my way back to standing and dumping snow out of my boot, I called to Birdie.
“Not that way. This way.”
I pointed in the direction beyond me. Three more steps and my left leg dropped into another air pocket. Birdie, about fifty feet away, doing a capital deaf-dog imitation, and finding more exciting scents was wildly wagging her tail.
Crawling out of the second air pocket, brushing snow off my coat and shaking out my mittens, I checked my location. I was off-trail, big time. I pointed the phone towards Birdie’s position. She was spot on. The right way. Sighing, I put away my phone and followed her.
Pinnacle trails aren’t well marked, and hiking in snow cover makes the blazes difficult to see. I did the best I could for another 20 steps or so as my boots kept slipping and sliding over snow covered tree branches and brush. Meanwhile, Birdie had started going the wrong direction again. Darn that dog!
I called her back to where I was standing. She turned, looked at me, looked down the trail and then at me, and slowly trotted back up the hill towards me. On that day, snow was forecast for later in the afternoon, and sometimes with a heavy cloud cover, I can’t get a fast reading of my location, so I have to wave the phone around to get it to pick up a signal, any signal. Minutes later, the phone updated our position. I was again way off course. Birdie’s former direction was the right way.
Gritting my teeth, I gave her a dried liver treat (good dog!) and told her to lead me to the car. She took off along a track I swore was the wrong way, but since I had amply demonstrated I wasn’t a good judge of direction on snow, I followed her.
On the way down, I had good traction, solid footing, no air pockets and soon I was spotting the trail markers more regularly than ever. Birdie led me down the hill where we met up with the trail I recognized as one we’d taken on the way up.
Main trail alongside a waste treatment tank — 70s color scheme included.
Home free. I pulled out my phone to check how far we’d come. Sheesh! We’d only gone about a mile and a half for the entire hike! This trek was supposed to be around 4.5 miles. By the time we got back to the trail leading to the parking lot, a full hour and a half had passed. Past time to get into the car and go meet my husband coming off the ski-slopes of Mt. Sunapee. My husband is a disabled veteran, and the Mt. Sunapee area puts on wonderful adaptive ski events for veterans in conjunction with local VA organizations, and we were up for the day in mid-March to get him on the slopes for a fun time.
That day, I learned a lesson about how capable a scent hound really is. Birdie saved us from rambling around the side of Mt. Pinnacle for at least another hour or two, and when we drove up to the ski slope parking area five – six miles from the trail head, it had gotten dark and started to snow.
