My friend and sometimes assistant lives some 6 hours' drive north of Sydney, and has been flying down to work 3 days per week with me. (Though that's coming to an end next week.) Consequently she has only public transport around Sydney while she's here.

Both of her Weimaraners died of old age in the last 18 months and she's been in the market for a new one, preferably a rescue one in need of a good home. They're harder to come by than you might think. (And she had no luck at all getting a rescue Boxer, which she considered via my influence.)

Enter Mr. Tex. Tex is 7 years old but unfortunately has had no luck in keeping a home in that time. The first two owners found that they just didn't have time for a large dog, and the last one had to give him up after he started jumping fences. He's ended up back with his original breeder (and his mum) but he's one too many dogs for them to keep which is why he's up for adoption. Unfortunately they both live way, way out in the far Western Suburbs, well beyond the easy reach of public transport.

So on the Australia Day holiday I saddled up my beast nice and early, headed north of the Harbour Bridge to pick my friend up from North Sydney (gods I hate the approaches to the Bridge where lanes disappear and reappear more often than in a Houdini act), put on The Escape Club's 80's hit "Headin' For The Wild Wild West", and pointed my magnificent vehicle along the M2 / M7 / M4 (hearing the frequent chirp of the toll collection pass at regular intervals, another reason that I prefer driving south) en route to check out Tex.

He has a genuinely lovely disposition, though he's a complete ditz with an attention span of about 5 seconds. (As Weimaraners tend to have.) Every time I tried to take a shot of him he'd start moving around, checking out this and that, shoving his nose into the camera, having a good sniff of my trousers, going kissy-kissy with my friend, yawning... I thought that I'd taken a good shot of him face on with the 60mm Macro lens but when I got it into Photoshop I found that he was moving at the time so instead of the focus being on his eyes (as I'd originally set it) it was part way down his snout. Consequently I've put up this shot that I took earlier with the 24-105. The rest of them I now have to process so that my friend can take them up to show her husband.

After that, to adopt, or not to adopt, that is the question.

Last Year