Barley, a dog, enters the frame from below as she pants happily while on a walk. Behind and above her, a wooded gulch extends into the distance. High above, a bridge allows a road to cross over the gulch entirely, bypassing it entirely. There’s something very appealing to me of a walking trail that passes under a very tall bridge. The sorts of bridges we have ready access to in most cities are, for completely practical reasons, rather grim places unloved by sunlight. There’s little question why such a spot would be a natural habitat for trolls. Here, by contrast, we can appreciate the simple miracles of civil engineering in the open air, in a space at once sunny and green, where the breeze is hardly affected and one can cross the road above with the feeling that it belongs to a wholly different world.

Barley, a dog, peers from a sofa through a window, her face overlaid by the reflections of blue sky and sun-dappled leaves. As disinterested as Barley is in watching yard work from the confines of a deck, she’s more motivated to do so when inside a house. This speaks to her strong sensibility that Inside Time and Outside Time are very different mental landscapes for her. My suspicion is that when she’s outside, and we’re outside, she’s thinking, “OK, we’re doing this, cool cool cool, they’re gonna come get me and we’ll hang,” whereas when we’re outside and she’s inside, her mind goes to a place of, “You’re coming back, right? You’re not going far, right?” She’s not fussy, she’s not trying to get our attention; I think she’s genuinely keeping tabs on us because she wants to know where we’re at. And should we slip out of her visual range, she’ll try to scope us out, and failing that she’ll find a good vantage point to monitor our likely path of return.

Juniper, a dog, lies in the grass on a dry, ‘resting’ lawn with her back to the camera, fussing with some small object (a ball) that is hidden from the camera’s view. Once Juniper has patrolled the perimeter and persuaded herself that all is well on the property, she will often plop herself down in a central location and hang out for a bit. If she has one of her tennis balls with her (as she often does), she may gently fuss with it a bit, although it is wholly unclear what she hopes to accomplish while doing so. As a dog who uses tennis balls as comfort objects, I have to wonder: Is she doting on it? Maybe, just maybe, she gains a sense of calm and relief from the burdens of the world by conveying to this inanimate object, in her own way, that “everything’s going to be fine.”

Barley, a dog, is slightly out of focus in the background. In the foreground, the surface of a picnic table upon which a series of commenters have written, “I like boobs,” “ME TOO,” and “We, too, love boobs.” I heard you thought this needed to be brought to a vote, but take a look: My ‘ayes’ are down here.

Barley, a dog, stands beside a wooden bench, painted green, beside a gravel path that has dense greenery encroaching upon it from all sides. There’s something very funny to me about parks conceived of after the fact, stitched together from land ill-suited for other uses. Such zones can vary a lot, from vast, featureless expanses of grass atop sealed landfills, to narrow, gerrymandered squiggles that trace the length of some natural ravine. This park is the latter sort, and as such has a single, unforking path that runs its length. The point, of course, is to provide a green space for people to enjoy, but there are really only two appropriate activities here: Wait or Proceed. This gives the path a feeling of purpose - someone must have cleared a path through this wilderness for a reason, so surely we must be going somewhere - but there is no destination of note at either end. It’s a paradoxical space, at once liminal and not, in which the only way to fully engage is to do nothing, because to do the only other thing available is to gradually depart, whether by taking the short way out or the long way.

Barley, a dog, lies on a raised deck and rests her head on its railing, giving the impression that she’s behind bars. When I visit my parents, there are inevitably a few bits of yard work that they’ve put off dealing with until someone Young And Strong (for certain values of both words) is available to help. While I’m pitching in, Barley will keep an eye on things from the deck, but it would be a stretch to say that she looks on with interest. Instead, unless some new person walks onto the property, she seems to zone out completely. As much as she enjoys a good sun basking, I suspect she’s otherwise not that big a fan of the deck, and mostly considers her time looking on as a dull interlude during which she has to wait in a corale that is altogether too far away from the rest of us, while we get to do inscrutable things down where all the interesting smells can be found.

Barley, a dog, sniffs with great intensity under a bench cut from a single thick log, in a park-like setting. Next to her is a big red chair. When Barley got her wish and made it to the big wooden bench mentioned yesterday, she certainly didn’t seem disappointed. On the contrary, she started sniffing hither and thither, spending a long time sniffing around under the bench. So far as I can tell, she never found anything, but her enthusiasm was sustained. Eventually, she started sniffing in a somewhat wider radius, and we made our way elsewhere. On the basis of this experience, I suspect (although this is pure speculation) that her initial desire to approach this specific location may have been because she caught the scent of a cat. If a stray cat had previously taken shelter under this bench (say, the night before), perhaps what Barley was so intently snuffling was a lingering feline afterscent.

Barley, a dog, makes her way through a park-like setting, and is particularly keen to approach a big red chair and a bench at the edge of the frame. With sunny summer weather comes the opportunity to take Barley on longer, more meandering walks, and I’ll often simply let Barley decide on our direction of travel for stretches of time (within reason). Given this latitude, she will sometimes pick a heading and pursue it with alarming vigor, as if she’s sighted some distant landmark, only to sort of lose steam after a couple hundred feet. I presume, in those cases, she’s following some scent on the wind that I’ll never know about. On the other hand, in the scenario here depicted, her target was very obviously visual. She really wanted to go check out this bench.

Barley, a dog, is curled up and sleeping on a bedspread of tumultuous blues and whites. This particular bedspread always gives me the impression of a stormy sea, with its Jackson-Pollock-dribbles of white transformed into whitecaps by the lumpy loftiness of the underlying duvet. Barley, curled up and comfy, and having sunk into that softness just a bit, seems all the world like the one steady atoll amid the chaos. Or at least, she does until the dreams come, and with them the sleep woofs and leg wiggles.

Juniper, a dog, lies on the grass with her head and shoulders in the shade of a mesh sun chair. She looks up at the camera, as a tennis ball rests between her elbows. Juniper is not a fan of playing tug. Nevertheless, she has a well-developed sense of “this is mine at the moment,” and is a little fussy about this sense of ownership. If teased with threats to take the object away, she has the opposite of Barley’s response - instead of flaunting the object defiantly, she slinks off with the object to some place she won’t be bothered so much. I suspect this is why so many of her toys make their way into her crate. Best way to keep her treasures safe, after all.

Barley, a dog, slumps her body against the backrest of a couch in order to look out a window, in effect lying down and sitting up at the same time. When someone leaves, Barley likes to keep tabs on their last known vector, as if she knows it’s also their most likely angle of approach. If you leave her in a car, for example, she’ll stay in the backseat if you walk away from the trunk side, but you’ll find her waiting in the front seat if you walk away from the car’s front half. So it is in the home: She notes each departure, and while she’s not glued to the window, she’ll gravitate back to the scene of her last sighting if nothing else is going on. This points to a rare source of inner conflict: She wants to be near where people are, but she also wants to keep an eye for the return of the departed, and she’ll sometimes commit to one location for a while, then meander back to the other. More often, she’ll try to split the difference, posting up in the spot that keeps her at least within earshot of nearby humans but lets her put eyes on returning folks as soon as they arrive.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a bizarre terraced yard made from concrete and bare earth that extends up and out of frame. This time, there is a handrail. Here we are, over a year later, and I am no closer to understanding the ziggurat yard. The earth along the road and back-filling the tiers are still bare earth, home to only tiny weeds that are still too small to have drawn the ire of whatever dark will has decided that this will be a monument to the inanimate, an edifice of desolate order. However, it now has a handrail. This was not part of the original design, and close examination reveals that it is being held in place by simple concrete screws that were sunk after the fact. To me, this exactly the same flavor of environmental storytelling as a sign in a shop forbidding some weirdly specific behavior: It’s a clue to a story that unfolded in the interim. For her part, Barley could not be less interested in these scaled-up LEGOs. Nothing here piqued her interest as even being worthy of a sniff. I had to cajole her to stay put while I took the photo, because she was eager to move on to (both literally and figuratively) greener pastures.

Barley, a dog, makes her way through an area of brown, desiccated grass, running from one edge of the frame to the other. It took me far longer than I care to admit to understand that dormant grass isn’t “dead” grass that “comes back to life” with the rain. It’s such a striking transformation in color and texture that the temptation to frame the change in terms of life or death comes strong, and in casual conversation it doesn’t feel like a meaningful distinction. As I’ve grown older, I increasingly see the capacity grass has to roll with the seasonal punches as a distinct and remarkable superpower. Imagine finding a long-forgotten, shriveled mummy behind a wall in your house, giving them a couple of gallons of water and some granola bars, and having the person fill back out and wake up as if they’d simply been hibernating.

Barley, a dog, lies contentedly on a sofa, panting in such a way as to give a big smile. There are a bunch of distinctly canine behaviors that Barley doesn’t exhibit very strongly. For example, she doesn’t engage in any herding behaviors. Still, there are little clues that hint at her inner desires. After all, the thing that vexes a lot of dogs with a strong herding instinct is when people disperse - they like for everyone to be hanging out in the same place. Barley never puts up a fuss when people go their separate ways, but it’s clear that people coming together is one of her favorite things. She loves when guests come over, she loves it when folks are in my office for meetings, she loves running up to and joining a group. Here, we see her pleased as punch at the end of a long drive, getting to sit on the sofa with my and my parents while we all catch up.

Barley, a dog, sniffs along the left, grassy edge of a gravel road with lush greenery on either side and leafy branches hanging overhead, casting pleasant, gentle shadows. Quite a few of the neighborhoods near work are crisscrossed by city blocks that remain unpaved. These “Roadway Not Improved” blocks are a remnant of a bygone era in which it was up to property owners to build the roads that would connect their unincorporated parcels to the rest of the roadways. Today, they feel to a townie like myself as though someone forgot to “finish the town.” Giving it a bit more thought, however, I suspect these roads have remained unimproved for decades because of more than just homeowners trying to avoid the considerable extra expense. Provided you’ve got a car that can handle a few potholes, these unpaved side streets are kind of nice. They get a lot less traffic, so they feel pedestrian-friendly (which is good, because they’re also usually too narrow to support sidewalks), and the road’s substrate is such that, if a car does pass through, you can hear them coming. Beyond that, there’s a rustic “less is more” aesthetic that appeals to me about these blocks. Just let stuff grow, growing things are easy on the eye! Replacing this scene with an entirely forgettable asphalt surface would no doubt have some advantages, but I’d consider it a visual downgrade.

Barley, a dog, leaps after a yellow seahorse toy that has been thrown. Both Barley and the toy show signs of motion blur, as well as a more subtle halo of “unenhancement blur.” Picking up on last week’s theme of “photos of my dog that are blurry,” I revisited this older photo recently and noticed something interesting. Barley and her seahorse Stella are blurry - this is unsurprising, since both are in motion. However, look carefully at the areas around them both, in particular the carpet. The ‘radius’ of blurring caused directly by Barley’s motion looks to be within 16 pixels or so, as judged from tracking the blur on her collar. The carpet in the background around Barley, however, is blurry to out to four or five times that distance. Go ahead and zoom in, see if you can spot the weird halo effect in the carpet around Barley. It’s at though parts of the camera had more time to get its act together, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was looking as it got closer to the action. I suspect this is a tell regarding just how much post-processing a camera phone does before presenting you with an image. I bet this camera took a lengthy burst of captures from its CMOS sensor, did an analysis of which regions were sufficiently stable to keep, and stitched this photo together from a mix of high-data/low-speed sampling from the periphery and low-data/high-speed sampling from the objects in motion. That wider “blur” is only visible because the texture of the carpet is about the same resolution as the background chromatic error, so even with a perfectly still camera, resolving that texture requires a longer sample time. That’s just speculation on my part, of course, but it goes to show just how much invisible artifice already goes into digital photography, even before we consider our looming nightmare of ubiquitous transformer-architecture cameraphone editing.

Juniper, a dog, hangs out in her crate with her beloved stuffies, watching out the open door from within the shadow cast by a crocheted blanket draped over its top. Juniper will (approximately) play fetch, but when she runs to get one her plush toys, it’s almost always to carry it to safety in her crate. At any given time, most of her toys are in her crate. If she’s going to play with one of her toys outside her crate, it’s usually because she’s already very relaxed. Toys + excitement = the “gotta get them to safety!” game. It’s a game she seems to enjoy; she’s not distressed by her toys being out and about. But she does like to decompress in there when she’s overly activated, so one presumes she’s looking out for their wellbeing.

Barley, a dog, sniffs at the base of a spiky ball of a shrug, about as tall as she is. Since dogs seem to have a collect agreement as to which landmarks are suitably appealing to become places to leave their mark, Barley’s investigations make her seem like some sort of shrub snob. She is not interested in your flowers, get out of here with flowers. Give her them shruuuubs! I feel like I’m watching a kid pick out the lima beans from their plate of mixed canned vegetables. “No to those, but yes to this!”

Barley, a dog, is out of focus in the foreground. Above her is a piece of driftwood, balanced precariously over blue water atop concrete wave breakers. At the tip of that piece of wood sits a tiny, barely discernable bird. Unlike yesterday’s photo, the subject of this photo is in focus: That tiny brown raptor sitting way out on the end of that balanced piece of wood. It remained perfectly still on its strange perch, apart from some small head movements, even after I spent a while waiting to see what it would do. Barley, for her part, never even seemed to notice the bird, being much more preoccupied with smelling and tasting the salt-water air.

Barley, a dog, stands in front of a striking tree. She is both out of focus and blinking at the time of the photo. I’ve certainly taken plenty of bad pictures of Barley that I’ve deleted, but I’m impressed by how perfectly I failed with this one. We have a nice, stable shot of the wrong subject, with Barley just out of focus enough to feel like an interloping defect in her own photo, and I somehow caught her mid-blink! It just goes to show, no matter how much the camera loves its subject, there’s always going to need to be a photographer who isn’t asleep at the wheel to ensure that the resulting photo is any good!