So my sister, the one whose soul mate is the incredibly exuberant Lola, the rescue dog, married a man who owns two Australian cattle dogs, Jack and Betty. A few years ago when we were visiting our mother in Sierra Vista, Arizona, we took the three dogs to the San Pedro River to blow off a little steam. I was sort of beginning my pet photography back then but I attempted taking action photos with my Canon and a 70-200 mm lens. It's tough to do, not gonna lie to you, especially when you don't know what you're doing, which I didn't, at the time.

Now I got a couple of really interesting ones of Jack and Lola. In one, Jack has a beautiful arc of water as he scampers through the river, In another, Jack and Lola come snout to snout with a grasshopper in mid-flight. It's one of those lucky shots. Who knew there was even a grasshopper there until I looked really closely in post-processing. But I didn't have any good ones of Betty, alas.

Fast forward to 2016, so far, my annus horribilus -- my horrible year. I'm staying at my sister's Phoenix house in November and she mentions she would like wall art of the dogs for her husband's man cave. But we have no Betty. Betty is getting on in years and because I am at my sister's house for a birthday party, there is no opportunity to do a photo shoot with Betty.

So I decided to look through my old images from the river to see if I missed anything. That in itself was no easy feat because they were in a deep archive. Once I found them and looked through them, l realized that at the time, I didn't miss anything. Betty wasn't good. But I have one really cute one of Betty with a huge branch in her mouth. Unfortunately, an out of focus Jack is cutting into her body making it unusable.

But these days, my Photoshop skills are much better and I attempted to take Jack out. It also meant rebuilding Betty and the river. But I did it! I tried cropping Jack out but it looked too weird leaving Betty with virtually half a body herself. And then I was worried that Jack's shadow really meant I would have to duplicate the fur to the point it really wasn't going to work. But it turns out, there is no Jack's shadow. It's Betty's markings. Whew. So then I found a somewhat similar image of Betty that included her distinctive tail and I added that. And I took a few pieces of river from other images to compensate for Jack's absence.

Once the Photoshop work was complete, I was able to create three 30x20 canvases for the man cave. Here they are, and the original one of Betty before cropping and the extraction of Jack.

UPDATE: My sister sent me a photo of the canvases she gave to her husband for Christmas and he loved them! Also included, which I did not write about, is Fiasco, his llama. I was able to photograph him in November so now he has a complete collection of all four animals!