At Emil Alzamora's

Caroline with her hands full at the Open Studio in Beacon.

Green with pleasure

The bench is chained down, the dog is tethered to the post, and the owner is clamped by the headset. No escape for anyone or anything.

Lydia and Mr. Red

This was not the photograph I meant to take, although the subjects had both struck me well enough. Caroline had hailed Lydia across the way in Central Park with a "He's friendly," referring to our dog Louis. Immediately the dogs played with the intensity of a feverish dance, and the women talked harnesses. I was left standing and about to leave them to it and wander off in search of subjects without animals when I thought that I had better just try and take a picture because subjects have a habit of not reappearing.

"Could I just take a picture of you and Mr. Red together?" I said loudly over the grunts and yelps from the dogs. To help, Caroline dragged Louis away from his new friend, but as Lydia sat down with Mr. Red for the picture he started jumping around looking for his playmate.

Then Lydia revealed the absolute way she has with dogs. With a few gentle words and a firm touch she had soothed him. There was no time for looking for the right background or light. I had to do it more or less where they stood. The background is not too bad; the light is a bit flat and too much from the top. The sitters do look as one, though, like true friends do.

A man and his greyhound

When nobody could have told you where Benidorm or Palma were, this was the place where happy holidaymakers in England came to sun themselves (or rather shiver) on the beach in late Victorian and Edwardian times - Scarborough, Northumberland. This was taken in 1980 long after the English any longer took holidays in England. But there, perched on the cliff, is where you would have stayed one hundred years ago. Is it still standing?

In this photograph all six legs, by chance, are off the ground. In the same way, also by chance, all four legs are off the ground in the photograph of the horse, posted on October 25th, 2009. I remember in this photograph, setting the focus on a 28mm lens to about 10 ft and keeping the dog and its owner that distance away from me.

Firm stance

You can't ask people to stand around while you fiddle about with camera settings when it is 14 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Dogs don't seem to mind so much especially when there is a person there feeding him treats. This is Nicholas's dog Louis who we have adopted while he works from his snowboard keeping things shipshape on the mountain in Okemo, Vermont for the winter.

Ten-year-old with her Spitzhauben

The chicken's name is Gravy, a German Spitzhauben, and it was the calmest and most obedient subject - very much due, I felt, to the handling skills of its owner who has ten chickens in all. She designed, and with the help of her father, built a house for them entirely out of recycled materials collected from friends' dumpsters and old materials from their own home improvements. See www.kidsonchicks.blogspot.com

Breaking in a thoroughbred

At the time I photographed this young thoroughbred being broken in (probably 1955), I was flying cargo planes to Australia for Freddie Laker. We used to have a stop-over in Karachi on the way. In London I exercised polo ponies in Richmond Park three mornings a week and I missed my rides when I was away on the two week round trip to Australia.

I asked at the hotel if there were any stables nearby and they said I should try the racing stables. I was not at all sure I could handle a race horse but they gave me one of their nice gentle retired animals. I still scared myself galloping across the desert.

I was lucky enough to be there one morning when this young horse was of being broken in. He had not yet had a saddle put on him. It was one of the first photographs I took with my Rolleiflex 2.8E

Girl with pony and bad finger

At the Kensington Stables, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY: a devoted groom. We watched her digging out the dirt from her pony's hooves, without flinching. A horse had bitten her the day before.

Joel and Margaret

Joel is an English language teacher and riding instructor. He is holding the leading rain attached to his pupil's horse, Margaret, a retired Belgium draft horse, who used to pull tourists around Central Park in her working days.

An accident waiting to happen

As dog owners go this man is a good one. He warns you as you approach him not to take a step nearer as his dog will bite you. This, of course, may not be true; he may just not like strangers addressing him. But he agreed to being photographed.

He was sitting outside Tillie's in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY.

Heather St. Clair and Socks

This is the right way to hold a ferret, by the scruff of the neck. My mother kept ferrets during World War II in England and used them to catch rabbits. We carried the ferrets in a sack to the rabbit warren and the ferrets never failed to return with our dinner. I was fond of these wriggly, thin beasts, but nobody had them as pets then. Nowadays they tuck themselves up into handmade sleeping bags and are as adored by their owners as cats and dogs.

Two Rhode Island Reds

I saw a photograph of Helmut on his wife's Facebook page. (Until now I had seen no value in the time-wasting activity of Facebooking, but I shall now use it as a source of possible subjects.) His wife told us that Helmut kept chickens and we were up their slippery dirt road the next day to take his picture. He said, gathering up two Rhode Island Reds, "Chickens are like dogs, if you are nice to them they will love you." As much as I would have liked to have used as a background the hand made wooden coops inside the brick gazebo, there was really no room for us all.

Anyway, we now have a regular supply of fresh eggs, which reminds me of a passage from Elizabeth David. "To produce neat plump, well shaped and comely poached eggs it is essential to start off with fresh eggs." Then she begins to make life difficult. "Not too fresh though. A really new laid egg is not good for poaching. Three-day-old eggs are ideal, although how, unless one keeps hens, one is ever to know the exact age of an egg is not a problem I can solve."

Lizzie

This is the dog who my wife Caroline and I look after three days a week. If only editors would react to my photographs the way the dog's owner did when I gave her a print for her birthday: she burst into tears. It was a slow shutter speed, maybe a 30th second, panning with the animal to give the background blur, and some good luck with Lizzie's graceful position at the moment she past me.