Knoxville Photographers

As many of you know, I’ve spent the past several days at Jan and Steve Curry’s Farm in Columbia, KY photographing an AKC Lure Coursing Event. What the heck is Lure Coursing? Here is Wikipedia’s take…

“In lure coursing, dogs chase an artificial lure across a field, following a pattern that is meant to simulate live coursing. A typical lure course is between 600 and 1000 yards (548 to 914 meters) long. In Europe the course length can be over 1000 meters, and may incorporate some obstacles or jumps. The course must have a minimum number of turns in order to simulate prey (the jack-rabbit or hare) changing direction in a chase. The fields can be fenced or not. If a dog is lure focused they will typically follow the lure from start to finish and not run off course. Dogs with some considerable lure experience, termed “lure-wise”, may try to anticipate or “cheat” by attempting to cut off the lure instead of trying to capture the lure using follow, speed and agility. Sighthounds generally have no need to be trained or enticed to chase the lure since the desire to chase is instinctual. However some breeds may require lure play at a very early age to encourage them to follow an artificial object with enthusiasm. Dogs must be at least one year old to compete; the hard fast turns are tough on a dog’s developing joints and lure coursing before the age of one can cause joint problems later in life.”

It may sound a little different, but after you see the dogs run one time it’s one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen! The dogs are just amazing, the people were some of the friendliest and most helpful I’ve ever been around, and Jan and Steve’s Farm is a photographers paradise. Thanks to everyone for all of the help, especially to Russ Bryson (Russ drove up on Saturday and shot all day, he captured some great images)!

Being our first lure coursing event, we had to go through a pretty steep learning curve, especially figuring out how to ID and sort the images. After Saturday afternoon we got a pretty good handle on that but I’m sure we have a few dogs grouped wrong and names misspelled, so I apologize in advance for any difficulty in finding your photos (we did try to take a shot of the ground in between runs, so that’s why you see so many lovely grass shots). Also I have not gone through the images to remove the “bad” ones (out of focus, butt shots, etc) but will try to do so as we finish the upload process. We are offering 5X7’s, 8X10’s, 16X20 Collages, and high resolution CD’s but are currently experiencing problems with our online gallery. Most of the images can be cropped quite closely and if you have any questions (or need other sizes or products)  feel free to call/email/text me. All images will be available later today and orders made before midnight on 7/2/09 receive a 20% discount. The gallery is located here BGCC PHOTOS.

Here are a few sample images from the past week…