Dog Photography at Radford Park | MJC Photography Plymouth

One of the more pressing reasons I have recently taken up a residency at Trident Studios is the simple, blissful reliability of a roof. It turns out that having a sturdy layer of industrial grade material between oneself and the heavens is a marvellous invention.

Mother Nature, it seems, took our collective grumbling about last summer’s hosepipe bans quite personally. In a fit of celestial overcompensation, she has spent the last few months ensuring we have enough precipitation to see us through to the next decade, and perhaps a small portion of the one after that.

Having been the grateful recipient of a gift voucher, available, I should shamelessly add, from our stall in the Tavistock Pannier Market (a chap has to eat, after all) I finally found a window of meteorological cooperation. It was a rare and fleeting opportunity to capture some photographs that didn’t involve me looking like a saturated North Sea fisherman in heavy duty Gore-Tex.

I decamped to Radford Park, a place of terrific, if slightly damp, variety. It boasts everything a photographer could desire: charmingly tumbledown stone buildings, an abundance of flora and fauna, and even a miniature castle that looks as though it were misplaced by a passing medieval giant.

In my mind’s eye, that dangerous place where logic rarely ventures,I envisioned elegant portraits of Luna set against vast, sweeping panoramic vistas. The reality, however, was somewhat more kinetic. Luna, evidently impressed by the terrain, decided the best way to appreciate the park was to traverse every square inch of it at breakneck speed.

It is a scene that has become distressingly familiar to the locals: a middle-aged man, increasingly red of face, prostrate in the mud with a camera clutched in his hand, emitting a series of desperate barks and whistles. All of this in the vain hope of arresting the subject’s attention for the fraction of a second required for a "formal" pose.

It is a specialized form of madness, I grant you. But oh, the elation when that frantic, muddy chaos aligns for one fleeting moment and becomes, quite simply, "The Shot."

If you have a four-legged friend who similarly treats the laws of physics as mere suggestions, I would love to meet them. Whether they prefer a dignified stroll or, like Luna, a series of frantic, mid-air acrobatics, we can capture a moment that actually lasts longer than a whistle.

Luna attempting to achieve low earth orbit in pursuit of a tennis ball at Radford Park