The following description is based on the rules governing the different types of testing that are still in a trial period (the trial period ends by the end of 2008). The rules are created by the Finland's Retriever Association and approved by the Finnish Kennel Club.

The tendency trial

The first step in testing a dogs hunting abilities in Finland is the tendency trial (NOU is the abbreviation used). It is meant to test the natural abilities and tendencies of a retriever and serves as a starting point for all future activities. The term aptitude test is also used, but I feel that tendency describes the goals of the trial better. It is important to note that while I use the term trial in this case, the event is in no way competetive and the dogs are working toward a standard. All game used in the tendency trial is cold game.

The trial consists of four different phases: social behavior, water work, search, and tracking. In the social behavior phase the dogs and handlers form a semi-circle or circle around the judge who describes the event and at the same time observes how the dogs behave. The judge will also greet each handler and dog in this phase. All of the other phases are individual activities.

For the water work phase the body of water must be large enough that dogs will not try to go around it and entry in the water must be relatively easy (typically the shore will be slightly marshy but deepen quickly). The first retrieve is to a bird thrown from the shore. The second retrieve follows immediately after a succesful retrieve of the first bird. First a shot is fired on the shore after which the bird is thrown from a boat. The distance of the second retrieve must be at least 20 metres (22 yards). Typically seagulls are used in this phase.

If the water work is passed, the dog will immediately move on to the search phase. The search area has five game birds hidden with the furthest at least 50 metres (55 yards) away. The terrain must also be covered enough that the dog can't see its handler all the time. When the dog is ready to begin, a shot is fired and the sixth bird is thrown into the area. Typically four or more retrieves are required.

If the search phase is passed, the dog returns to the waiting area. Once all of the dogs have completed the water work and search phases, the dogs that have passed the initial phases will move on to the trail. The trail is J-shaped and 80 metres long with a bunny at the end.

The following attributes are evaluated: swimming, search and retrieve eagerness, grip, returns, reaction to shots, self-confidence and initiative, cooperation, and general appearance. Based on personal experience, definite no-nos are commanding the dog to pick-up the game or braking the game. A lack of self-confidence or enthusiasm also quickly leads to failure even though the judge often tries to encourage uncertain dogs.

It is important to remember that the goal is to evaluate the natural tendencies of the dog. This means that the judge can encourage a dog that feels uncertain in a new situation, a dog can come back from a search empty handed etc.

Once the tendency trial has been passed, the way is open to hunting tests and working trials. It is also important to note that passing the tendency trial is a requirement for a dog to become Finnish champion in the show ring. Of the Finnish flatcoats born between 1995-2006 28.5% have passed the tendency trial and 7.7% have failed, the rest haven't tried. In comparison, with golden retrievers the percentages are 4.3% and 2.2% respectively.

Hunt tests

Most Finnish dogs that continue working in organized field events participate in hunt tests (NOME-B is the abbreviation used for the tests). The tests are designed to evaluate the ability and willingness of retrievers to work in conditions similar to hunting and are working toward a standard.

The tests have three classes: beginner (alokasluokka, ALO), open (avoinluokka, AVO), and winner (voittajaluokka VOI). Dogs start in the beginner class without age restrictions and can move on to open class after they have received on first place (ALO 1). They can still participate in beginner class events to the end of the calendar year when they've gotten a first place. The same qualifications and limits apply to moving from open to winner classes.

The game used in hunt tests must be of at least two different species (game used in water tasks must be water fowl). Bunnies, rabbits, and hares may also be used. In the winner class bumpers may also be used. The species must be the same for all the dogs in any given test and a test may not mix using game and bumpers.

The terrain in the test must resemble normal (Finnish) hunting terrains. This means that in most tasks the dog can not see the game and the water must be deep enough to force the dog to swim. Decoys can be used in water areas and winner class tasks may also be performed from a boat.

The dog is given at least six retrieves both on land and in water, during which at least three shots are fired. In open and winner classes the waiting ability of a dog while another performs can also be evaluated.

In the beginning of the test it is assumed that the shooter has dropped a given amount of game. Some locations of the game are well known and of some only the general area is known. The following tasks are given to the dogs (in any order):

• Search tasks where the dog must not see its handler all the time.
• Guidance tasks in which the handler guides the dog to the game. The handler should be able to see the dog during most of the task.
• Marking tasks in which the dog sees the game falling after a shot is fired. In open and
  winner classes the judge may designate the order in which the game must be retrieved.
• In beginner class a trailing task is added to the end for those dogs that still have a chance for a first place position. The trail is about 200 metres (220 yards) long and the dog starts 10 metres away from the trail.

In hunt tests the following attributes are evaluated: search, scenting ability, efficency and endurance, locating ability, reaction to shots, game handling, water work, trailing ability, cooperation, controllability, calmness and silence, and the general appearance.

The first place is given to dogs with an excellent overall performance. The second place goes to dogs with a good and the third place to dogs with an adequate overall performance. If the overall performance isn't enough for a placement, the result is zero (0). A line (-) as the result means that the test for the dog was interrupted by the handler.

Part 1 describes the tendency trial and hunt tests with cold game. A forthcoming part 2 will describe working tests, warm game hunt tests, and a practical hunt test. This is a work in progress, so all comments on how to improve the text are appreciated. If you'd like to republish this text, please contact me at rmiraftabi@gmail.com. All pictures are © 2008 Anna and Ramin Miraftabi and may not be used without permission.

The statistics were gathered from the Life of Jalo, which is our dogs photoblog. The pictures are taken by myself or Anna.

My own photoblog with pictures of whatever (including the occasional dog ;) is at shutterclicks.

During the last almost year that I've been collecting Google Analytics stats from it the number of daily visitors has risen from a bit under thirty a day to about fifty a day. Visitor loyalty is quite good since less than 25% of visits are new.

The most popular posts during the time frame have been the front page (~24% of pageviews), the image of 08.10.2007 (1.35%), and the first ever post (1.21%).

Quite clearly, visitors mainly visit the site quite regularly. The spike of October 8 last year is explained by the huge spike of visitors caused by a link on a popular pet forum by a friend. I have no idea how many of the visitors in the spike continued to follow the photoblog.

As such, LoJ isn't exactly primetime material since it is a photoblog that follows the lives of our dogs, currently four retrievers. Based on the comments, the most active visitors are friends and other retriever owners. Including shots of dogs training for hunting and hunting probably doesn't increase general appeal. And quite puppy pictures appear only when there's a puppy in the house.

Most of the visitors are from Finland, but slowly LoJ has been gaining an international readerbase. It has been bilingual (Finnish and English) from the start. Finland still dominates the statistics, but the US has lately passed other European countries for a clear second place.

Those are my statistics for the project on blog statistics. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of stats others have.

Many photography enthusiasts and early-adopters probably have large screens and resolutions available to them and are probably vocal in promoting posting larger images. We started publishing our shots in Life of Jalo at 500 pixels. Later I got tired of looking at the small pictures myself and thought that with the transition from dialup connections to DSL-lines users could afford larger image sizes, so we went to 700 pixels. It's also the size I use on shutterclicks and our gallery.

Looking at the statistics of our sites has me wondering if the choice is exactly a good one. The following table shows the two most popular screen resolutions on for different sites (our gallery, LoJ, an unnamed site, and our homepage):

In addition, on the first site the third place is taken by 1280x800 with 17.48% (bringing the combined value to 76.89%. If we presume that a user with a smaller screen will always use the browser in the maximized state (do they?), we can safely think that horizontal space won't be a problem. Of course this doesn't take into account the fact that many users seem to have various sidebars installed, but even then 700px horizontally shouldn't be an issue.

But clearly 700px vertically is a challenge for many users. On my work computer (Windows 1400x1050) the windows decorations, menubar and other user interface components take up 160px of vertical space. In the bottom the statusbar and Windows taskbar take up another 95px (the taskbar height is doubled). Even with a one line taskbar I'd still lose about 60px.

So far it seems like most photoblogs assume that their viewers have enough screen real-estate that (vertically) larger images will work, but should other approaches be considered. For example, Kathleen Connally's photoblog has an option that lets users select the image size they want to see. I wonder what her statistics are like, especially the relation between screen resolution and selected image size.

Another consideration that comes with image sizes is the possibility of image theft. The larger the size of the available image (even if linked), the more possible uses a thief can get from it. A widely publicized case of this happening was the whole debacle between Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir and Only-Dreemin (and to a lesser extent Flickr). 700px is still a safe size - at least for now.

I'd like to hear other photographers and photobloggers opinion on the matter. And users, or photo viewers, should also voice their opinions.

But for some odd reason, we won't be eating loads of food while watching the game, despite the various recipes that I've bumped in to.

I learned to watch American football (plain football is what Americans call soccer - go figure) from my Mom when she used to get video tapes of mainly college games through some friends. For a long time I couldn't figure the game out, but playing it on the computer (some Amiga version in the late 80s/early 90s) helped me understand the game. Now I've spent the last few years trying to teach Anna the basics of the sport. By watching a game a year.

I honestly didn't even know who's playing until four hours before kick-off. When you get a game a year who's playing isn't important. I'll see who I'm rooting for once the game starts. Old favorites from summers spent in the States are the Eagles and 49ers, but neither made it this year.

Jeffrey Zeldman a supports the IE teams decision on pragmatic grounds, which I can understand. But not accept.

Jeremy Keith has a slightly better view of the whole matter. As a web developer, I'd agree with Jeremy. As such the option isn't bad, but the default behavior is wrong. Microsoft and the whole web standards movement could benefit immensely if the launch of IE8 would be marketed as an step towards the future with and optional way to stay backwards compatible.

I suspect most clients with mission critical web systems would quickly ask their developers if anything needs to be done to ensure the systems will work fine. With IE7 Microsoft didn't really market the improvements in its rendering to the general public which meant that clients and developers outside the loop of standards awareness were caught by surprise. I'm quite certain that it wouldn't be too large of a challenge to the marketers at Microsoft to come up with a campaign to educate the general public on the benefits of either turning on the IE7 rendering mode or developing their sites further to really work.

That is, if I'd support the whole idea of leaving a legacy rendering engine in place.

As a software engineer I shudder with the whole idea that the IE team is presenting. How many times have you heard that the problems with Windows (or any other software product) comes from the necessity of supporting legacy systems? How many times have those issues caused serious bugs, security problems or development headaches and slipping timetables?

By far, my worst fear with this approach is the headaches that will be caused when we're at IEx (where x > 8) and the OS APIs etc need to change. Is the change possible, or will we face a situation in which Windows development (or IE development) suffers because backwards compatibility must be maintained? The more time passes, the less reliable the basic IE7 codebase will be.

While many may argue that it's just a browser, not an OS etc. I don't believe that the relative smallness will save IE from the problems that maintaining exact backwards compatibility will cause. I've seen more than a fair share of small, medium, and large projects struggle with backwards compatibility issues. Throwing more resources at a larger and more complex project isn't a magic bullet.

However, it seems as if this aspect won't be a consideration. So I'll join Jeremy in voting that IE=edge rendering be the default. I'm also quite certain, that the PR value of this kind of change would be better for MS. At least better than not advertising the technical advances that the browser has made.

P.S. I wrote this while debugging a heap of J2EE code for an obscure but caused by backwards compatibility, so I may also be biased.

Update: At least Robert O'Callahan also shares my doubts on the maintenance issues.

Luckily around the same time Trevor Carpenter published his challenge for the whole year 2008: document your community. In his look at how the challenge has been progressing he posted a vision very similar to mine.

Very soon after I decided to participate in the challenge I starting thinking on how I could utilize the images I took. The thought of creating a book with the selections and other supporting images with some accompanying text was very appealing. The book idea was appealing for two reasons:

1. it gives me a clear goal to strive for and focuses my efforts a bit more, and
2. it is something I can give to relatives living in other parts of the world to show where I live.

Now we'll just have to wait and see how I do with the project. If you want, you can follow only my 2008 challenge pictures by looking at the shots tagged with 2008challenge on shutterclicks.

The comments so far on Brian's poll are also quite interesting and show the difference in purchasing power. While surprisingly many are willing to pay larger amounts of money for prints I ended up answering what would be my absolute maximum (without months of saving up to it ;). On the other hand, I also tried to think of a price that would feel acceptable to me as a photographer.

I ended up answering $ 80 (50 €). It's a price that I can afford every now and then as a treat but doesn't require months of planning and saving. I liked the point raised in one of the comments that for more expensive prints limited and possibly signed prints would justify the price. That's seems to be the approach that chromasia has taken in their print offerings - larger prints are numbered and limited.

When considering pricing for prints there's also a quality factor that needs to be considered. Brian's talking about fine art photography (which I hope some shots in shutterclicks could some time be included in ;) in which prices are higher than portrait shoots etc. And justifiably so, after all with a portrait shoot the client has already payed a price for the creative effort and time to take the pictures.

We're thinking of starting up a small dog photography business (as a side project for whatever else we do) and one the main hurdles at the moment is figuring out a pricing model that would leave us clients but wouldn't feel like charity. Remeber, that while consumer purchasing power is rising in Finland, it still isn't at the same level as the States. And dog enthusiasts are generally broke...

But at the same time, I can't help but think how does cheaper pricing in portrait photography (and dog photography etc.) affect the photographers creative expenditure. Does a cheaper pricing structure mean that the full power of the photographers creativity isn't put into the shoot? Even at a subconscious level? Or does the professionalism of the photographer mean that the client is given the full potential of the photographer?

I'd like to think that the price at which I'd sell pictures wouldn't affect the amount of creative energy I'd put into a shoot, but in all honesty I'm not so certain. Of course, as a craftsman, I have enough professional pride (even if I'm not a pro) that I will do my very best to create quality images, but the extra mile may just be lacking. On the other hand, is there anything wrong in saving your best efforts for projects that mean a bit more than routine shoots for a client?

I'm now using a very bare bones install of WordPress with the Yet-Another-PhotoBlog plugin. And SpamKarma for spam filtering (which works much better than Akismet in my experience). I'll probably look into other plugins to use on shutterclicks as well once I get all of the Pixelpost content moved over to WordPress. I used the import script from Shifting Pixel to do the base work.

However, it had problems in importing the images and embedding them in the correct post so I need to do some manual work as well. Which is to the better, since I'd need to fiddle around with the images to get them working with YAPB anyhow.

While YAPB has all of the documentation needed to get it going, it still needs some thought before it is fully functional. Unless of course you let it do all the necessary code injection of the pictures (which I naturally don't). For example, there's no template tag to insert the picture itself without any thumbnailing so you have to use some code for it. The following does the trick well enough:

<img src="<?php echo $post-/>image->uri ?>" width="< ?php echo $post->image->width ?>" height="< ?php echo $post->image->height ?>" />

Also, the EXIF output is quite horrible and needs formatting to be more readable. Well, that's all IMHO ;). But I've never liked to see EXIF data displayed as it is on many websites in the very mathematic way (with lots of precision in the numbers etc). Rather I like to see it similar to the camera display (and how Lightroom shows it). So I wrote the following code to customize the EXIF output:

	if ($exif = ExifUtils::getExifData($post->image)) {
		echo '
<ul class="exif">';
		if (!empty($exif['model'])) {
			echo '
<li>' . $exif['model'] . '</li>
 
 ';
		}
		if (!empty($exif['exposureTime'])) {
			$time = $exif['exposureTime'];
			$i = strpos($time, '(');
			$j = strpos($time, ')', $i);
			$time = substr($time, $i + 1, $j - $i - 1);
   			$t = explode('/', $time, 2);
            if (empty($t[1]))
               	echo "
<li>$time s</li>
 
";
            elseif ($t[1] == 1)
                echo "
<li>$t[0] s</li>
 
";
            else
           		echo '
<li>' . $t[0] . '/' . $t[1] . "&#x00A0;s</li>
 
 ";
		}
		if (!empty($exif['fnumber'])) {
			echo '
<li>' . $exif['fnumber'] . '</li>
 
 ';
		}
		if (!empty($exif['isoEquiv']))
			echo '
<li>ISO&#x00A0;' . $exif['isoEquiv'] . '</li>
 
 ';
		if (!empty($exif['exposureBias'])) {
			$ev = $exif['exposureBias'];
			$i = strpos($ev, '(');
			$j = strpos($ev, ')', $i);
			$ev = substr($ev, $i + 1, $j - $i - 1);
			$ev = explode('/', $ev, 2);
            if ($ev[0] == 0)
	            $ev = '0';
   			elseif ($ev[1] >= 10)
           		$ev = $ev[0]/10 . '/' . $ev[1]/10;
   			else
           		$ev = $ev[0] . '/' . $ev[1];
           	echo "
<li>$ev&#x00A0;EV</li>
 
 ";
		}
		if (!empty($exif['focalLength'])) {
			$mm = $exif['focalLength'];
			$i = strpos($mm, ' ');
			$mm = substr($mm, 0, $i);
			$mm = round($mm, 0);
			echo "
<li>$mm&#x00A0;mm</li>
 
 ";
		}
		if (!empty($exif['flashUsed']))
			echo '
<li>Flash:&#x00A0;' . $exif['flashUsed'] . '</li>
 
';
		echo '</ul>
 
';
	}

That code still needs some work, I'm not satisfied with how the exposure bias is displayed (3/3 when I'd like +1 in those cases). But at least it's a step in the right direction.

There's still some work I need to do with the current theme: at least archives, new URL structures, etc. I chose to implement a fairly clean site without dependencies on other sites. The never published version 3 was supposed to have hooks to various other sites that I've now simply linked to in the sidebar. I've noticed that blogs that include pictures from Flickr streams and content from various sources can be annoyingly slow to load. And since content should be king in blogs I decided just to link to the other resources.

The only exception to what I said above is the inclusion of the latest Life of Jalo image in sidebar, but since it's on the same server as this blog, there shouldn't be any noticeable delay in generating the page (and the heavy lifting is done server-side).

The new layout hasn't been reliably tested on IE6 since I suspect my install of Multiple IEs to be borked somehow. IE7 has some minor issues that I won't be worrying about and I'll get around to checking the site in IE6 at some point of time.

Hopefully now that I have a design that I can stand to look at I'll start writing more here. My lack of writing hasn't been due to a lack of ideas.