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!

In the left panel, Barley, a dog, sits behind a screen door, her tail wagging fast enough to create motion blur. In the right panel, she looks up excitedly at someone approaching, whose legs are just coming into the frame. Barley handles being left on her own well, inasmuch as she doesn’t whine, doesn’t howl, doesn’t act out or get destructive. There is every indication that she pines silently for the departed for a little while, then goes to sleep. But she never really spends that much time alone - it’s rare for her to be on her own more than two or three hours - and I still wonder whether, in spite of her good behavior, she still experiences sadness when her humans depart. Her enthusiasm whenever anyone familiar arrives, whether they’ve been gone for ten minutes or six months, is always quite pronounced, so because her time alone is actually pretty minimal, I don’t think it’s out of the question that her joy at folks arriving probably adds up to a net positive when balanced against her sadness at folks leaving.

Barley, a dog, walks past a mysterious pile of something that is covered in a heavy green plastic tarp, the entire perimeter of which is weighed down by large, flat stones. Look, I know this is probably some pile of boring raw materials that, for whatever reason, need to avoid getting rained on while some project is in progress, but I for the life of me cannot get the thought out of my head that a shrub got in over its head with some loan sharks and is now getting violently iced by blocking the rays of the life-giving sun. What kind of racket has this yard got going on?!

Barley, a dog, stands on a wooden deck in the late afternoon and faces the sun. Barley closes her eyes and extends her tongue, making a little blep. Barley looks away from the sun and extends her tongue more fully, touching her nose. Barley will quite often, stop and deliver these thousand-yard stares that appear very thoughtful. It’s only by watching her nose and the subtle rhythm of her ribcage to see that she’s probably not looking at all, but is instead smelling. Indeed, she almost always does this facing into the wind, it’s just that the air motion can be so subtle as to hardly register as a breeze if you aren’t paying attention. Having given a sufficient sniff, the tongue must do its thing, and reset her sniffer for maximum acuity.

Juniper, a dog, rests on her giant dog bed with her beloved and immaculate monkey plush. The extent to which Juniper Is Baby, even as she is solidly middle-aged, is something only witnessed by those she has become fully comfortable around. For all her wariness, all her patrolling of the perimeter, all her barking at passing cars, I think the thing Juniper wants most dearly is for things to be safe and chill. Inevitably, some of the unrest in her life comes from within, but I don’t doubt that Juniper hopes that someone could Take Care Of It and let her unwind.

Barley, a dog, stands before a shallow earthen embankment around a shadowed depression in the ground. It is a sunny day. Here’s what the summer’s multiple heat waves have managed to do to the on-again-off-again pond that offered brief refuge to those ducks I posted about a bit ago. Well, nothing here for a duck right now. This will serve merely as a potential duck getaway for now, until the seasons bring back the rains and pairs of ducks who need some alone time.

Barley, a dog, stands on a sidewalk that extends straight ahead to a vanishing point. Because the surrounding yards are lush in their floral appointments and fencing, this vanishing point is the only one available within the frame. I’m a big fan of “just walking around a bunch,” but the professional grind of adult life has been such that, until I became a dog owner, there wasn’t usually time to do so. My favorite experience of walking around is getting a feel for a neighborhood. Even neighborhoods that feel bad or dull are interesting for their ability to evoke such feelings. I recognize, though, that my ability to turn my experience of a neighborhood into an overall conceptual object I can ponder after the fact, requires a big-picture perspective on the world that Barley probably isn’t bringing to the table. I imagine her worldview is far more fragmentary and disconnected. “Oh hey, I can smell the ocean today, cool (End of thought).” My impression is that she has a pretty poor navigational sense for any space larger than a small house, so it may well be that the idea of “a neighborhood” is already too large for her mental buffer.