We were staying in Northern Colorado, almost Wyoming, with our Golden Retriever Lily, and our Border Collie Emma. We knew it probably would be Emma's last trip. She was almost 14 and was having frequent seizures. I had to hold her up when she went outside to relieve herself. She passed about a week after we got home, in my arms on the living room floor. What I was not prepared for is that it would be Lily's last camping trip too. She was five, very active and we thought, healthy. The Monday after Christmas we received the devastating news that she had cancer everywhere in her body, so we made her as comfortable as possible. What I remember about this photograph is that both dogs were playing in the woods together, and that the younger dog, Lily, had set herself as the guardian of her older sister. Even to the degree that she would take turns in getting the ball when it was thrown with her sister, and she would lead her sister back to the house when we were going back inside.

Normally, in large format landscape photography I am fighting for every millimeter of depth of field that I can get. In this instance a light mist had begun to roll into the forest and my idea was to cue off of that and make a photograph that would be very light in tone with as shallow a depth of field as I could manage, and this is it. Using an f-5.6 maximum aperture lens I had to tinker with focus to make sure it was place exactly. The photograph was done using a Toyo 45A, a Sinaron 150mm lens with no filter. Kodak T-Max 100 film.