Taking Good Pictures of Sheep

This is Wolf Moon Black Baart, one of our Classic Cheviot wethers

Because so many people ask me how we take such good photos of our animals, I'm going to post this to both Goat Tips & Tricks and Sheep Tips & Tricks, except with different pictures to each blog.

Really, taking good pictures is easy and you don't need a top-of-the-line camera to do it well. We took publication-quality 35mm transparencies (slides) with a bargain basement Pentax K-1000 manual camera and two interchangeable lenses for over 15 years. When the K-1000 gave up the ghost, we switched to a Pentax ME Super and we'd still be using it if we hadn't discovered digital photography. Now I'm a convert and we use a Canon EOS Rebel XTi  with two lenses, a 75-300mm zoom and an 18-55mm zoom. Unlike the K-1000, it wasn't cheap but we've used it for four years on a nearly daily basis to shoot many thousands of pictures, so it's more than paid its way. I prefer the Canon to my 35mm camera because I can shoot loads of pictures at virtually no cost.

The Goblin King is racing to me to have his chest
and chin scratched--he's a very gentle ram

I want to stress that you don't need an expensive camera with all the bells and whistles to take good photos. Photography became my hobby early-on and my first camera was a Brownie Hawkeye (you can't get much simpler than that). I used it to take a picture that won a Grand Championship ribbon at the Indiana State Fair. I later won awards in horse photography contests with pictures taken with Instamatic cameras. I don't know an f-stop from an orangutan and you don't need to in order to take great pictures. You just have to follow a few simple rules and learn to use the camera you've got.



Shebaa baahs

 However, if you can afford it, buy a camera with interchangeable lenses so you can use a zoom lens to shoot animal pictures. That way you can stay farther from your subject and the zoom helps keep its parts in proportion. An 80-200mm zoom is perfect for livestock photography.

Choose the highest resolution setting on your camera. You’ll hate it if you shoot the perfect picture in poor-quality low-resolution.

Ronnie is a "whoops!" lamb by our Scottish Blackface ram and out of a Classic Cheviot ewe

Plan your shoot. Find a nice backdrop or at least remove junk from the background you have.

Shoot at the right time of day. Morning and evening lighting is perfect; shooting when the sun is overhead casts deep shadows. Stand with the sun at your back or slightly over one shoulder. Watch to make sure your shadow doesn’t spoil the image.

Othello is Ronnie's Scottish Blackface daddy

Get down on your subject’s level. Level with the center of its body is perfect. Kneel, sit, or lie on your tummy but never shoot from above. That distorts your subject’s body and gives him short legs.

Ask someone to help you grab your subject’s interest at just the right time. Have your helper toodle a kazoo, wave a plastic bag, squeak a squeaky toy, or roll on the ground. Keep in mind you want an alert expression, not panic. Experiment until you find the right ploy; this is especially important when photographing sheep.

In this photo our 5 year old wether, Wolf Moon Baarney, is in glorious, full fleece

Fill the frame but don’t cut off ears, feet, or tails. Or, learn to use photo editing software to crop your favorite shots.

If you’re working alone, be patient. Sit with your camera ready and wait for the perfect picture to happen.

Stay alert while sitting, especially with your camera at your face. I've been ambushed by nasty roosters, flattened by a flying goat (propelled my direction by another goat), and used as a jungle gym by bottle lambs and kids.

Wolf Moon Gunnar Woolenbrau was hours old in this picture

Shoot a lot of pictures. I delete at least 15 images for every one I save.  

And when you move position, watch where you park your butt, especially if sitting in animal poop offends you. Or, you could sit on a thistle. I've done it and it hurts!

The beautiful Wolf Moon Wren is always photogenic

Freecycle

Arthur and Miss Maple eat from a reused sheep mineral tub while baby Gunnar looks on

If you keep sheep, goats, or any other kind of livestock on your farm, you need Freecycle. According to its website, Freecycle is "a network made up of 5,040 groups with 8,949,161 members around the world. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by local volunteers. Membership is free."

We belong to Freecycle and we love it. Over the three months we've given away 11 paper feed sacks stuffed with Classic Cheviot fleece; my two old but very usable Mac computers to use as word processors; innumerable bags of llama poop; and a Mantis garden tiller for parts. Freecyclers have in turn given us 10 large cattle mineral tubs; a short stack of used sheep panels; and a huge wooden dog house for our goat kids

To find a Freecycle group near you, visit the Freecycle website and type your state in the search box. Let's say you live down the road from us in northern Arkansas, where there are 58 groups including groups in Fulton and Sharp Counties. Click on the one that says Fulton County. This brings you to a page outlining Freecycle's goals and an email hyperlink to freecycle_fulton_county_arkansas-owner@yahoogroups.com Send an email to that address to touch base with the volunteer who moderates that group. He or she will outline the local group's rules and help you sign in.

Basically, Freecycle exists to give away unwanted but useful stuff. It isn't a place to constantly ask for things. However, if you have a reasonable need, ask. We reuse our own sheep and goat mineral tubs as water tubs for our small animals and feeders for all of our stock but needed bigger mineral tubs to water our llama, horses, donkey and steers. Ranchers are eager to get rid of these tubs. Freecycle put us in touch with those ranchers. At Freecycle, everybody wins.
============
Please visit my Sue Weaver – Ozark Writer and Goat Tips & Tricks blogs, as well as my Facebook writer's page

Sheep or Goat Feeling Oogy? Give Him a Beer!

I'd like to pass along a valuable tip given to us by John and Alice Moore of Redgate Zwartbles Flock 252, who raise beautiful Zwartbles sheep at their farm on the Shropshire/Mid Wales borders in Great Britain. Be sure to visit their public Redgate Zwartbles Facebook pages and view their lovely sheep.

At the time, our enormous Boer-Nubian goat wether, Salem, was feeding poorly and didn't want to eat. We'd given him vitamin B injections and oral probiotics to no avail. Alice said to feed him beer.

Yes, beer. As soon as she said it I recalled reading about old-time horsemen drenching colicky horses with beer.

Alice had gotten the tip from an old Welsh shepherdess when one of the Redgate Zwartbles was sick. Given beer the ewe recovered. So off we went to buy Salem some beer.

We needed dark beer, the darker the better. Keep in mind that neither John nor I drink and we live in a 'dry' county in northern Arkansas. There's a liquor store across the state line in Thayer, Missouri, but just one, so we didn't have a lot of types of beer to choose from. We decided on the store's only bock beer. It wasn't as dark as we'd have liked but "bock" means "buck" in German. We took that as a sign.

The next trick was feeding it to Salem. We tried drawing it into a dose syringe and ended up with 5 cc of beer and 25cc of foam in the chamber. So, we decided it must be done the old-fashioned way. I forced Salem's mouth open and John poured in a little beer. Salem gulped, swallowed, and licked his lips. We kept it up, always giving him time to swallow, until the bottle was empty (since Salem wasn't exactly standing still, some of it splashed on the ground). That evening we gave him another beer and by then he decided he liked it. When I checked on him later that night, he was happily munching hay. Fantastic!

A beer bottle topped with a calf bucket nipple with a slightly smaller than 1/4" hole
cut in the end makes a first-class straight-from-the-bottle sheep and goat drencher. 

The next time we needed it, we were prepared. John (just call him McGyver) figured out a safer system for dosing beer. He bought a calf bucket replacement nipple from the feed store and opened a slightly smaller than ¼" hole in the end. This can be snugged down over the neck of a beer bottle, protecting the animal's mouth and also helping assure the bottle doesn't break.

Tumnus LOVED his beer!

This next patient was Tumnus, another Boer-Nubian wether of somewhat smaller size. Tumnus loved the beer and begged for more. Again, after two beers, one in the morning and another in late afternoon, he was right as rain.

Recently one of my purebred Nubian wethers, Hutch, went off his feed and out came the beer. At first taste Hutch gagged and his eyes bugged out on stems. Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! But Hutch, too, improved after two feedings (maybe so he wouldn't have to choke down any more beer).

Is it the hops that do the trick? We don't know! Keep in mind that we dose with beer in addition to doing more straightforward medical things. But if you have a sick sheep or goat, haul out the beer and give it a try. It just might work!

P.S. We were later told that by allowing the beer to go flat, it's possible to dose using a dose syringe. But maybe the bubbles help? Since we're not sure, we'll keep on dosing beer straight from the bottle, just in case.
==========

Please visit my Sue Weaver – Ozark Writer and Goat Tips & Tricks blogs, as well as my Facebook writer's page