Today I made one of my regular visits to Animal Helpline Dog Rescue to take portraits of their latest 'guests'. As always, there were lots of volunteers, helping these poor little creatures to be as happy and comfortable as possible; and also training them ready for their new homes. These really are good people, in stark contrast many of those who've put these dogs in the position they're in.

And all the dogs, of course, are beautiful, so making portraits of them is easy. 

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It was a pretty cold day, as you can see, but winter does have its advantages. For one thing, the low sun does wonders for furry friends, so we manoeuvred them into patches of sunshine. The result is instant hair-lighting.

I shot all these on my Nikon D810 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, adding some positive exposure compensation to offset the backlighting from the sun. One of the advantages of that camera, and other very high-res DSLRs like the recent Nikon D850, is the amount of cropping you can do in post production. This means erratic subjects (of which rescue dogs are one), can be shot quite loosely, or in portrait or landscape format, and cropped into the opposite format while still having plenty of detail. 

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