K-9 Ryker

Originally published at canisstudio blog. You can comment here or there.

Earlier in the week I was fortunate enough to score a fantastic opportunity, not only as a photographer but as a dog person. I’ve been trying to get my foot in the door with any of the local police departments to photograph their K-9 dogs and just about by accident ended up spending three days shooting at a K-9 and SWAT training school. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to talk about anything I saw so you’ll have use your imagination. I will say that it was very, very cool and gave me a new level of appreciation for how serious and dangerous the job these guys do really is.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is the dogs. They were interesting to watch, the way they’d get excited and start vocalizing like crazy once they realized it was time to go to work. They’re also beautiful dogs, though you wouldn’t ever want to be on the business end of one. Seriously.

I would have liked to chat up the handlers because I had a million questions but they were there to train, not play 20 questions with me, so I just did my thing with the cameras. I shot a ton of photos. Really cool photos. Unfortunately you’ll have to use your imagination again because 99.9% of them are private. I did get permission to post these though:

This is Ryker, a huge German Shepherd with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. He’s over 100 pounds, most of it hair, and he enjoys swimming, playing hide and seek, long walks on the beach and pulling bad guys out of small, confined spaces. His partner, Deputy Rafael Cortada, is the guy who thought having a photographer around was a cool enough idea to make it happen and get me access to everything. I owe him a huge thanks!

Here we see Ryker taking a break from training on Sunday. Being a police dog is clearly hard work.

Once again, taking a break from training to run around for a few minutes…hard work and all that.

I’m working on getting the okay from some of the other handlers to post photos of their dogs, so hopefully there will be more to come. Stay tuned…